Thom Jones grew up in a gritty Illinois factory town. His father abandoned the family and was later committed to a mental institution, where he hanged himself. When Thom was still a teenager, he joined the Marines. Savagely beaten in a boxing match at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and mistakenly given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, he was discharged — to his great good fortune: All the members of his reconnaissance unit but one were killed in Vietnam.

Mr. Jones worked on the Betty Crocker Noodles Almondine line at a General Mills plant. He was fired as an advertising copywriter because, he was told, a client would not countenance his proposed slogan for the Jolly Green Giant — which was more or less, with an expletive inserted, “These are the best peas I ever ate.”

Recovering from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs, Mr. Jones was 47 and working nights as a janitor in a Lacey, Wash., high school when he mailed, unsolicited, a fictionalized Vietnam War story to The New Yorker. It was admired so immediately that it bypassed the usual vetting by multiple editors and sailed into print in late 1991, receiving critical acclaim, and the O. Henry Award in 1993 for best short story.

Thus did Mr. Jones, who died on Friday at 71 in Olympia, Wash., burst from obscurity to become an idiosyncratic literary sensation.