During the 1990s, Thom Jones rose from obscurity to become one of the brightest literary talents in the country. He was a high school janitor and onetime boxer who, in his late 40s, submitted a short story to the New Yorker that, against all odds, the magazine published.
“The Pugilist at Rest” won the prestigious O. Henry Award and became the title of Mr. Jones’s first collection, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other stories soon appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s and Playboy, and for a few years Mr. Jones seemed to be the rightful heir to Raymond Carver, Norman Mailer or even Ernest Hemingway.
“Writers as good as Thom Jones appear but rarely,” novelist Thomas McGuane wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1993. “The original poetry of his fictional world is irresistible.”
His tales reflected the troubled lives of damaged men who were boxers, Marines, heavy drinkers or blue-collar workers — all of which Mr. Jones had been, at one time or another. His characters always wanted more from life than it offered.
Three collections of short stories came out between 1993 and 1999. Then Mr. Jones largely fell silent and did not publish another book for the rest of his life.
He died Oct. 14 at a medical rehabilitation facility in Olympia, Wash. He was 71.
The cause was complications from diabetes, said his wife, Sally Jones.
Even during the years when he was working in factories, pushing a broom, getting fired from jobs, battling illness and going through rehab, Mr. Jones always thought of himself as a writer.
“I’m a great believer in fate, and I believe that all those things in my life had to happen — being a drunk, a boxer, the epilepsy, the diabetes,” he told the Seattle Times. “You have to suffer a lot before you can be a writer of fiction.”
Mr. Jones almost found acclaim in his early 20s, when one of his stories was accepted by the Atlantic. But he refused to make the changes requested by the editor, and it never appeared.
He studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early 1970s and watched as several of his classmates, including Tracy Kidder, T. Coraghessan Boyle and Denis Johnson, became celebrated authors.
A decade later, Mr. Jones was working as a janitor at a high school in Lacey, Wash. When he finished polishing the floors during the graveyard shift, he went to the school library to read.
One morning at home, he was drinking beer and wearing his custodian’s shirt labeled “Thomas” when he saw Kidder, the author of “The Soul of a New Machine” and other books, interviewed on television.
He quit drinking and began to write. “The Pugilist at Rest,” his first and most famous story, took its title from a Greek sculpture and was inspired by Mr. Jones’s stint in the Marines.
An amateur boxer who had more than 150 fights in his teens, Mr. Jones went into the ring at Camp Pendleton, Calif., to face a more experienced Marine champion. He was so badly beaten that he ended up in a psychiatric facility, suffering from headaches, double vision and other symptoms. He was eventually diagnosed with a form of epilepsy and was granted a medical discharge.
“The guys in my unit all got killed in Vietnam, except for one,” Mr. Jones told the New York Times in 1993. “I wanted to go. I was such a fool. My best friend went and he got killed. I married his girl.”
“The Pugilist at Rest,” which Mr. Jones wrote in about 12 hours, derived from those experiences. Even though he did not go to Vietnam, he depicted the field of battle — and the death of the central character’s best friend — with brutal intensity.
“There was a reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam,” he wrote. “I grieved for myself and what I had lost. I committed unspeakable crimes and got medals for it.”
He sent “The Pugilist at Rest” to the New Yorker, the country’s premier outlet for short fiction. His unsolicited manuscript was published on Dec. 2, 1991.
“One of the great things about the New Yorker,” he said in 1993, “is that they read their mail. I put something out there — and I’m nobody — and I made it.”
Thomas Douglas Jones was born Jan. 26, 1945, in Aurora, Ill. His father, a onetime boxer, introduced his son to the sport but later abandoned the family. (He committed suicide, hanging himself in a mental institution in Oregon, in the 1970s.)
Mr. Jones struggled with authority figures, including his stepfather, but found solace in boxing before enlisting in the Marines. “I had been a blue-collar guy destined for a blue-collar life,” he told the Associated Press in 1994.
After being seriously injured in the boxing ring, Mr. Jones began to read philosophy and literature. He attended four colleges before graduating from the University of Washington in 1970. He received a master’s degree from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.
He held factory jobs and briefly worked as an advertising copywriter in Chicago, composing an obscene slogan about the Jolly Green Giant. As a parting shot, he threw his typewriter out a window. He was fired from a job as a newsletter editor — told that his writing wasn’t good enough. He ended up working for a decade as a school janitor.
Mr. Jones published a second volume of stories, “Cold Snap,” in 1995. A final collection, “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” appeared in 1999. The reviews were mixed, and Mr. Jones’s output diminished. A novel long in the works never appeared.
Survivors include his wife of 48 years, Sally Williams Jones of Olympia, and a daughter, Jenny Jones of New Orleans.
“I just like getting my characters in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Jones said in 1996, describing his writing and much of his life. “I figure . . . they’re going to snap, and that’s going to be interesting. That’s sort of the way I proceed.”
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