The Known World

The Known World is a 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer Edward P. Jones.

Edward P. Jones

CBC Books Posted: Mar 03, 2020 3:35 PM EST | Last Updated: October 26, 2020

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker and former slave, has a fondness forParadise Lostand an unusual mentor William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation as well as of his own slaves.

When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery and rumours of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present,The Known Worldweaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whitesand Indians and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. (From HarperCollins)

Edward P. Jones is an award-winning American author and short story writer. His first short story collection,Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection,All Aunt Hagar's Children, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He was awarded a MacArthur"genius" grantfellowship in 2005.

From the book

The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins. The young ones, his son among them, had been sent out of the fields an hour or so before the adults, to prepare the late supper and, if there was time enough, to play in the few minutes of sun that were left. When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right. He had been in the fields for all of fourteen hours. He paused before leaving the fields as the evening quiet wrapped itself about him. The mule quivered, wanting home and rest. Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing. He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.

FromThe Known Worldby Edward P. Jones 2007. Published by Amistad.

Interviews with Edward P. Jones

Writers and Company52:07Edward P. Jones in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel (2005)

The American writer discusses his novel The Known World.

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