By Michelle M. Murphy

It was a chance meeting with a young Jesuit that prompted Edward P. Jones ’72 - the winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World - to apply to Holy Cross, and to this day he can’t quite believe he was accepted.

“His name was Joseph Owens; I always called him ‘Father,’ even though he wasn’t ordained yet,” recalls Jones. “He graduated from Boston College but was teaching philosophy at Holy Cross and was spending the summer in D.C. He was always traveling around the neighborhood on his bike, knocking on people’s doors. He was a real people person.”

Owens persuaded Jones to send applications to two places, Holy Cross and Boston College; he got into only one. “I knew nothing about the Jesuits, and I didn’t know anything about applying to college at all,” says Jones. “I didn’t know about the fact that you only look good at 600 or 700 (on the SATs). I had a 489 verbal and a 532 math - I still have the little card with the scores on it. My counselor wrote ‘good’ across the top. She was just being kind, I guess, I don’t know. It wasn’t until years later that I found out you got 200 just for writing your name.”

It’s safe to say that Jones has more than demonstrated his verbal abilities since then. Writing on the side - that is, while working for 19 years as an editor at a tax newsletter in Arlington, Va. - he is two-for-two as an author: The only two books he’s ever written have both won critical acclaim and prestigious awards.

You’d never know it to talk to him, though.

“He’s very unassuming,” says Holy Cross English Professor Maurice Géracht, who taught Jones in three courses - and whom Jones credits with being the first to encourage him as a writer. “He’s a wonderful role model. He’s not someone who has played political games or made contacts to achieve what he has. It’s been based on performance only. It’s extraordinary and very moving.”

Jones grew up poor, the oldest of three children - he has one sister and a brother who is mentally challenged - whose father left them even before Jones started school. His mother, Jeanette, struggled to keep them together by working multiple jobs as a maid and dishwasher. They moved 18 times in 18 years. “Each place was worse than the last,” recalls Jones, who now rents an apartment in the heart of Washington and has yet to own a car - declaring that he never will.

Because his mother could not read or write, Jones signed his own report cards, taking care that the signatures for each quarter closely resembled those of the previous ones. Despite his circumstances - or maybe because of them - he immersed himself in stories: first, “funny” books like Spiderman and, later, works like Native Son by Richard Wright and His Eye Is on the Sparrow , an autobiography by the late black American singer and actress, Ethel Waters.

At Holy Cross, he was one of about two dozen black students in the Class of ’72. Painfully shy, he had intended to major in math but, as the only black student in his first-year math class, he sat in the back of the room, never asked questions, and soon fell far behind in his work. He quickly switched his major to English.

“I had Fr. Healy as a freshman, and he always had us writing essays,” Jones recalls. “I had no typewriter (the other kids did), but he never said one single word about me writing things out in longhand. He was just interested in the quality of the work. He kept giving me all these A’s.”

As a second-year student, Jones enrolled in Géracht’s 19 th-century novel course.

“In those days, students had a lot less distraction and read a lot more - we did 13 novels in a semester, and they were big ones!” Géracht recalls with a chuckle. “I’m not sure that all the students read all those books. But I do know that Ed did. He was a voracious reader. That still stands out in my mind after all these years. He was shy, but when called on, he was not only where he should be (in the book), but beyond.”

Jones was part of the very first creative writing class at Holy Cross - led by Géracht. “We responded to student needs as best we could (by adding the creative writing program) - that’s really very much Holy Cross,” Géracht says. “And the way I taught creative writing was the way I had been taught creative writing as an undergraduate - by reading at least two anthologies of short stories, and reading them very closely. We analyzed the stories in terms of structure and point of view, and the students would try to imitate or transfer what they’d learned to create their own piece.

“I certainly didn’t teach Ed Jones how to write. He really has his own voice, and it was evident even then. But I did teach him how to read closely,” he continues. “And I do think some of those exercises are evident in his short stories. I am not saying I was responsible for that. But I do think that what you read when you’re young stays with you, somewhere.”

By the time Jones was in his final year at the College, his mother had had several strokes. His sister and aunt were coming for graduation, but he didn’t expect his mother to be able to make the trip. “When I walked into the stadium, I looked up in the stands, and there she was,” he says. “They told me later that when they were driving here, and she got her first glimpse of Holy Cross up on the hill, she started crying. That was the first time she’d ever seen it.”

Jones returned to Washington after college, partly to help care for his ailing mother. Working odd jobs, he had a hand-to-mouth existence, and, after his mother died in 1975, he was ready to leave the district. Although he had to ask his sister for the $15 bus fare so that he could join her in New York, he also received some good news around this time - notification from Essence magazine that it was going to publish one of his stories - along with a check for $400. So, he stayed put. Jones later went to graduate school at the University of Virginia , where he earned a master of fine arts degree. He returned to the district in 1983, after landing a job summarizing tax-related news items for Tax Notes, a newsletter based in Arlington , Va.

Over the years, Jones wrote when he could. Lost in the City, a collection of short stories about life in Washington, D.C., came out in 1992; winner of the PEN/Hemingway award, it was a finalist for the National Book Award. After that, he began noodling around with ideas for his second book, a novel that would be based on a single fact he learned at Holy Cross: In the 1800s, some free blacks actually owned slaves themselves.

“I don’t remember where I saw that - maybe a footnote - one line, maybe - somewhere,” Jones says. “I was surprised. Slavery had always been black and white up until then. I didn’t explore it at all. I learned of it, put it in my head, and that was it.” Although he read a few other books on the era, he never actually did any real research. “It just kept taking shape in my head.”

Finally, in late 2001, the characters he was creating demanded to be let out. So, he put in for five weeks of vacation and began writing the novel in earnest. Then, an amazing thing happened: After 19 years, he lost his job in a layoff. That cloud of unemployment - so ominous to a man who’d grown up poor - turned out to have the most silver of linings because it prompted Jones to keep working on The Known World, which he finished in March 2002; it was in bookstores by August 2003. “Stunning,” said The New York Times. “One of the best new pieces of American fiction in years,” said The Washington Post.

“It’s an unbelievable book,” says Géracht. “It’s a wonderful, humane kind of work. It’s not a polemic. It’s a real meditation on what it is to be human.”

The Known World was a finalist for the National Book Award last fall, and, in March, won the fiction prize from the National Book Critics Circle. Then came the Pulitzer.

“There are moments when I can believe it. There are moments when I can’t,” Jones says. “The highest hope I had was that someone would say ‘yes’ to publishing it. There’s a part of me that’s a simple person who’s going to the grocery store, going to the video store - who just has normal days. And then there’s another person, the one who, when you weren’t looking, wrote this book, and he’s watching the regular guy do all those things. It’s strange.”

Cushioned by funds from a handful of literary grants he’s won over the years, as well as the success of The Known World, that “regular guy” continues to live a simple life - he has never married, and has no children - and is writing full time these days. His next book, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, another collection of short stories, is due out in the fall of 2005.

“I don’t think he set out to be a writer, but I think he always liked to write,” concludes Géracht. “I think his experience at Holy Cross supported that notion. My view is that I’m glad we did our job. Affirming students is what we do - is what we should do as teachers. We often have wonderful material to work with, and if we can nurture this, it’s very satisfying. I would be the last to take credit for this wonderful guy. But if, after all these years, he remembers Holy Cross, it’s because we were there for him, present for him. That’s often what we do best.”

Michelle Murphy is a freelance writer from West Hartford, Conn.