Edward P. Jones' first novel, The Known World, trolled a hidden corner of antebellum history: the lives of free, slaveholding blacks. Jones, who lives in Washington, D.C., became a MacArthur fellow in 2004, a year after the novel was published. "Edward P. Jones is a fiction writer who renders in story a mysterious incongruity of the human experience-how faith, dignity and love often survive, and sometimes thrive, in the face of systemic adversity ... [He] works painstakingly to compose artful, morally complicated fiction that challenges, provokes and enriches," the MacArthur Foundation said. Jones graduated from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass.