Preston Jones is known only for his plays.

Preston Jones is often labeled a regional playwright, and certainly one of his achievements was his treatment of the American Southwest as a setting for serious drama. His plays capture the idiosyncratic characters, regional language, and unique experience of the rural Southwest at a time of transition for the land and its people. The significance of Jones’s work, however, is not limited to his recording of the life of a specific community. The plays are significant commentaries on the way people deal with fundamental human problems: the pain of loneliness, the fear of failure, the effects of time. Like Anton Chekhov, Jones chronicles the passing of a way of life, and he does so with much of the gentle criticism and humorous affection of the Russian playwright. Jones’s work also contains an exuberance and rough energy, however, which are uniquely his and are rooted in the language and energy of his characters. Indeed, Jones’s discovery of the value to be found in the lives and troubles of the most ordinary of people and of the lyric poetry embedded in their native idiom constitutes his most important theatrical achievement.