Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World, talks with Kate Sullivan about his Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel.

Jones was born and raised in Washington, D.C., and educated at both the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia.

His first book, Lost in the City, is a collection of short stories about the African-American working class in 20th-century Washington, D.C. In the early stories are some who are like first-generation immigrants, as they have come to the city as part of the Great Migration from the rural South.

His second book, The Known World, was set in a fictional Virginia county and had a protagonist who was a mixed-race black planter andslaveholder. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Jones's third book, All Aunt Hagar's Children, was published in 2006. Like Lost in the City, it is a collection of short stories that deal with African Americans, mostly in Washington, D.C. Several of the stories had been previously published in The New Yorker magazine. The stories in the book take up the lives of ancillary characters in Lost in the City. In 2007, it was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, which was won by Philip Roth's Everyman.

Interviewed by Kate Sullivan, WordSmitten Media, Inc.

(Reused with permission. Creative Commons License)