Thom Jones, American writer, Died at 71

  Dead Famous

Thom Jones was born on January 26, 1945, and died on October 14, 2016.
He was an American writer, primarily of short stories.
Thom went to college at the University of Hawaii, where he played catcher on the baseball team.
Jones later attended the University of Washington, from which he graduated in 1970.
Thom studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, from which he received an M.F.A. in 1973.
Jones was trained in Force Reconnaissance in the Marine Corps but was discharged before his unit was sent to Vietnam.
Jones used this and other personal experiences, including the suicide of his father, a boxer, after being confined to a mental institution, as sources for his fiction.
When he graduated from college, he worked as a copywriter for a Chicago advertising agency and later as a janitor, all the while reading and writing for hours each day.
Jones was “discovered” well into his forties by the fiction editors of The New Yorker, who published “The Pugilist at Rest” (1991), which won an O. Henry Award.
Which was included in Best American Short Stories of 1992.
His other stories of his were published in The New Yorker, as well as in Harper’s, Esquire, Mirabella, Story, and Buzz.
During 1993 Jones published his first collection of stories, for which this was the title story.
He resided in Olympia, Washington.
Thom Jones passed away at 71 years old.