Thom Jones
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Thom Jones (born January 26, 1945) is an American writer, primarily of short stories.
Jones was raised in Aurora, Illinois and attended the University of Hawaii where he played catcher on the baseball team. He later attended the University of Washington, where he graduated in 1970, and the University of Iowa where he received an M.F.A. in 1973.
Jones trained in Force Reconnaissance in the Marine Corps but was discharged before his unit was sent to Vietnam. His experiences and the suicide of his boxer father in a mental institution became consistent sources of material for his fiction writing. He was discovered, when well into his 40s and working as a janitor after a stint as a copywriter for a Chicago ad agency, by the fiction editors of The New Yorker, who published a series of his stories in the early 1990s. One of the first of these stories, "The Pugilist at Rest", won an O. Henry Award. John Updike in a Salon interview praised him as one of two writers of a younger generation that he admired and anthologized his story, "I Want To Live!" in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" collection he edited.
His first book, published in 1993, was a short story collection, also called The Pugilist at Rest. The stories deal with the common themes of mortality and pain, with characters that often find a kind of solace in the rather pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Boxing, absent or mentally ill fathers', physical trauma and the Vietnam War are also recurring motifs. The book was a National Book Award finalist.
His other books include Cold Snap (1995) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (1999), both collections of short stories. Recently he has written scripts for feature films, including a Vietnam screenplay for Cheyenne, actor Bruce Willis' production company and an adaptation of deceased Mississippi author Larry Brown's final novel, "The Rabbit Factory" for Ithaka Films, a production company affiliated with the mini-major studio Lionsgate. At least insofar as measured by publications, he has been less active as a writer in recent years, compared to his 1990s pace. He currently resides in Olympia, Washington and has temporal lobe epilepsy and suffers from diabetes.
