Life

According to Jones' self-description in "Puget Sound Profiles",
he was born in Seattle and graduated with honors from Whitman College, beginning his career as a campus correspondent for the Walla Walla Daily Bulletin. He was chief editorial writer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is an online newspaper and former print newspaper covering Seattle, Washington, United States, and the surrounding metropolitan area...

He wrote and narrated short stories for the radio program "Puget Sound Profiles" broadcast in the early 1960s on over a dozen Washington State stations such as KOMO (AM)

KOMO (AM)

KOMO is a radio station based in Seattle, Washington. Its format is primarily news. From 2003 to 2008, it was also the flagship station of the Seattle Mariners Radio Network...

, KTAC, KAGT

KAGT

KAGT is a radio station and affiliate of the Air 1 network, playing contemporary Christian music.-History:KAGT was originally a Southern gospel radio station that served the Abilene, Texas, area...

 and more.

He described himself as an "un-reconstructed Puget Sounder -- a salmon eater, an apple knocker, a rain worshiper, a sage-brusher, a whistle punk from the big woods and a fancier of mountain peaks at sunrise".

Jones lived and worked in several parts of the USA but focused on Puget Sound Country. He wrote over 300 short stories for magazines and 17 books (12 novels).

He lived in the city of Weston, Oregon

Weston, Oregon

Weston is a city in Umatilla County, Oregon, United States. It was originally a post office called Mitchell's Station, established in February 1867. In September 1869, T.T. Lieuallen renamed the post office after his hometown, Weston, Missouri. The population was 717 at the 2000 census...

 with his parents between 1919 and 1927.

Oregon Detour

Jones' first novel, Oregon Detour, was set in a fictional Oregon town of 600 inhabitants called "Creston". When his novel, written according to the tenets of the New Realism

New realism

Nouveau réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan...

 literary movement (established years before by Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...

, Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...

and others) was published in 1930, many of the residents of Weston were convinced that his characters were based on local inhabitants, and considered the work a slander against the town. While the legend that Jones was sued and ran out of town for his book is not true, members of the town made an effort to suppress local access to the book: copies of the novel were stolen from the local library; after the novel became the subject for a high school student's book report, his English teacher removed the book from both the reading list and the high school library. According to George Venn, local literary historian, even in the 1980s "trying to figure out or trying to remember who the 'real people' in the novel is still a local pastime."