For more than 10 years, a novel was cooking in Edward P. Jones' mind. In 1991 he published his first book, "Lost in the City" - a collection of stories that earned critical acclaim in the United States and won him the Pen/Hemingway Prize. After that, many people expected him to sit down and write the novel that would justify his reputation as a "born writer," but Jones disappeared. He lived his life in Virginia, working as the editor of a tax journal, and didn't write anything.

Jones, an African-American born in Washington, D.C., is a simple man. At 57, he lives alone in a modest apartment, out of the public eye. He speaks simply, and unlike many acclaimed writers, he does not radiate self-importance. He barely calls himself a writer; he considers himself a person who writes stories from time to time.

More than a decade after his first book, Jones returned to the literary arena in 2003, with his first novel, "The Known World." A year later, the book won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2005 it also won the European International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the accompanying 100,000-euro prize. Oprah Winfrey read the book and was so moved she cried. She called Jones, spoke to him for half an hour and invited him to her show. Sales soared. The New Yorker began to publish his stories regularly. All this did not change Jones in any fundamental way.

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"The Known World," which has just been published in Hebrew by Opus Press, translated by Inga Michaeli, was born of a sentence Jones heard in college many years ago: Before the American Civil War, his lecturer said, there were black plantation owners who owned slaves. The book tells of one such slave owner, Henry Townsend, who is himself a freed slave and lives in the fictional Manchester County in antebellum Virginia. Townsend buys 33 slaves and runs his plantation highhandedly until his early death. His wife Caldonia struggles to maintain the plantation after he dies, and then things begin to change.

A hard life

Edward Paul Jones was born to a poor family in Washington, D.C. His mother, who was illiterate, worked cleaning jobs to raise him, his sister and his mentally retarded brother. The family moved 18 times during Jones' childhood, mostly to small one-room apartments. When he was 18 he won a scholarship to attend the College of the Holy Cross, where he received his B.A. in 1972.

Jones has never married, and has no children. His mother died in 1975, which affected him greatly and seems to have shaped him to this day. "That was a terrible blow for me," he said once in an interview. "She was 57 or 58 when she died, and she had a hard life." His father died a few months later. After his mother's death Jones moved to Virginia, where his mother was born. Aside from his day job, he began studying creative writing at the University of Virginia. In the 1980s he started writing stories, and in 1991 he published "The Known World." He has since published another collection of short stories, "All Aunt Hagar's Children," depicting the life of African-Americans in Washington. "Now I am looking for something new to do," he says in a telephone interview.

Historical fiction

"The Known World" is not based on historical research; it is entirely fictional. Jones had intended to conduct research: "I didn't do any studying. I was planning to read 40 or so books about American slavery, but from 1992 until almost 10 years later I kept putting off reading these books, I didn't have whatever it took to start doing the research. So I never read the books, but what I did in my head was create the novel, just based on what I already knew about that time period. If you get to 40 years old, you have accumulated some knowledge. The most important thing, always, is the characters," he says, adding that he knew a bit about America in 1855 and used that as the basis for his book.

His imagination worked for 10 years, as characters were born and died. Stories engendered more stories, and an entire world developed. For 10 years he wrote only in his head. At first he thought he wasn't entitled to write until he had read all those 40 books about slavery, but after 10 years he realized that wasn't going to happen. So he simply sat down and started to write. That was December 2001, and by March 2002, he already had a first draft.

What is the difference between white slave owners and black slave owners?

"I didn't think there's much difference at all. In the end, if you hold people in bondage, it doesn't matter if you're white or black - it's the same thing for the slave. Same oppression. By the end of the book ... something also is happening to the oppressors. The sheriff in the novel is torn because he doesn't believe in slavery, yet his job is to make sure the slave remains a slave. You get a man who by the end has stomach troubles and is essentially falling apart - I wanted to show what happens to the oppressors. Of course he doesn't have any slaves himself, but he's just as bad as any slaveowner."

A novel about characters

"I didn't have any agenda when I wrote the book, any issues I wanted to get across," he says. "I believe in certain things but I wasn't intending to write a propaganda novel. A novel is always about characters, people at one particular time."

During the writing, were you thinking about slavery as a mental state?

"It does something to you if you are a slave," he says. "You take on a certain mentality. You have the feeling that you're not worthy. Moses, in the novel, is probably the best example of what happens to people who become slaves and are unable to free themselves in any sort of mental sense. Once he runs away he can't figure out where he is, because his whole state of mind is being a slave in that particular place. On the other hand there is the slave Elias; he has not confined his mind to being a slave, he is open to thinking about other things. Once he realizes he can't run away, he is still open and he falls in love with Celeste. They get married and have a family, and he is free in his own way.

"Maya Angelou wrote a book called 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.' If you have a bird in a cage and you open the cage's door, the bird doesn't take advantage of it, it just stays in the cage because that's its mentality."

When asked to what extent the book is a response to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "Beloved," Jones says he hadn't read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" prior to writing the novel. While writing, he declined to read many novels about slavery, so as not to be influenced by what others had written. This, he notes, might be why he decided to write this novel, because he knew of no other novels about black slave owners and he wanted to blaze a path of his own. He did, however, read "Beloved" well before he thought about his own novel.

Winning the Pulitzer, he says, was very, very nice - better than not winning. He was living in Virginia and he had just finished packing for a move. He had a lot of books to box, which was very difficult because he had no help. While he was packing he learned he had won the Pulitzer, and this made his packing a great deal easier.

Jones lived in Arlington, Virginia for 21 years, until his return to Washington three years ago. In explaining the move, he says his upstairs neighbors made a lot of noise and he was tired of hearing their voices. After he published the novel, people said good things about it and he thought that maybe he should live somewhere where he wouldn't hear the upstairs neighbors' footsteps. And, he adds, maybe he just was homesick for his hometown.

My mother used to say

Inga Michaeli, who translated "The Known World" into Hebrew, traveled to the United States for a program for international translators at Banff in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. This was at an arts center that every year invites 15 translators from different countries for three weeks. Among other things, they meet with writers there. Edward P. Jones spent a week in Banff and made friends with his translator, Michaeli. The two are still in touch.

"We met every day and sat together for two hours," says Michaeli. "He couldn't help me with the translation, but he told me about the book, about the writing process and about his mother, who influenced him greatly. She had colorful, unique expressions, and he used them in the book. It is very hard to translate the slaves' dialects into Hebrew." She notes that in writing dialect, people usually use the apostrophe a lot, but "Edward intentionally did not because it makes the text look ugly. So neither did I."

Jones apparently is very shy. "For a week he barely left his room," says Michaeli. "All the other writers were extroverts and went out with us. He is very different."Jones told her about the unusual names he sought for characters in the book, "because many slaves had unusual names - Fran, Stamford. He called the wicked slave trader Darcy, because he hated the book 'Pride and Prejudice.' I was very surprised he hadn't conducted any research. When I started to translate the book, the first thing I did was try to research Manchester County, Virginia, until I realized it doesn't really exist. He invented census data, the prices of slaves, a woman historian who never existed, a whole world."