The Known World - Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones, Marilyn Herbert
Category: Novel
Tags: Novel, Historical Fiction, Adults
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2004, National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2004, Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginias Manchester County. Under Robbinss 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: 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 rumor 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
