WPost Profiles MVS Author

The cover story of Sunday's Washington Post magazine is on author Edward Jones, who has won numerous awards.  The opener to his future book is ""In late May 1956 -- a little more than a year after my mother bought the Fifth Street NW house that was the beginning of her small empire -- she heard a rumor that my father was dying."  The setting is a familiar one to Jones.  Though his work is fiction, his novels are often set in his childhood neighborhood, Mount Vernon Square and Shaw. His family moved around a lot 18 times in 18 years.   Among his many address were 1004 4th Street, 1138 5th Street, 1525 6th Street, 459 Ridge Street, 1132 8th Street NW, 618 New York Avenue, and houses on the 400 Blocks of M Street and New York Avenue.  He attended Walker-Jones Elementary School and Shaw Junior High School.  

From the article, which also includes a photo gallery with several shots of our neighborhood:

You can read all about Jones's youth without ever asking him a question. In the story "Common Law," in "Hagar's," a woman is hit by her boyfriend on the second floor of an apartment building at 459 Ridge St. NW. She tumbles down the stairs as a group of wide-eyed children watch. As a child, Jones lived in the first-floor apartment at that address. Had such a fictional woman tumbled down the steps, she would have fallen into his non-fictional lap. He liked that address so much, in fact, that he set the title story of "Lost in the City," next door at 457 Ridge St. NW. The corner shop in "The Store," at Fifth and O St. NW, is the very shop he went into for treats as a child.

"The characters are fictional, but it's important to place them in real houses," he says. "I don't know what it is, but it's much better for me to say so and so lived there, it's a real place."