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The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
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One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, The Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones.
The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order, and chaos ensues. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.
- Sales Rank: #90519 in Books
- Brand: Jones, Edward P.
- Published on: 2006-08-29
- Released on: 2006-08-29
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.08" w x 5.50" l, .98 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
Amazon.com Review
Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South. His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Va.-worried about the fate of his holdings upon his early death. As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins. Even after Henry's parents purchase the family's freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. Jones's thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region. His richest characterizations-of Robbins and Henry-are particularly revealing. Though he is a cruel master to his slaves, Robbins is desperately in love with a black woman and feels as much fondness for Henry as for his own children; Henry, meanwhile, reads Milton, but beats his slaves as readily as Robbins does. Henry's wife, Caldonia, is not as disciplined as her husband, and when he dies, his worst fears are realized: the plantation falls into chaos. Jones's prose can be rather static and his phrasings ponderous, but his narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight and generous character writing.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
On a small plantation in Manchester County, Virginia, in the eighteen-fifties, a freed black man named Henry Townsend lives with his wife and the thirty-three slaves he has bought, some with the help of his former owner. This kaleidoscopic first novel depicts daily life for Henry and his friends ("members of a free Negro class that, while not having the power of some whites, had been brought up to believe that they were rulers waiting in the wings"); for the plantation's slaves, one of whom believes that he, too, will be transformed into an owner after Henry's death; and for the county's white inhabitants, who coexist uneasily with their slaves and their emancipated black neighbors. Jones has written a book of tremendous moral intricacy: no relationship here is left unaltered by the bonds of ownership, and liberty eludes most of Manchester County's residents, not just its slaves.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Read It With A Purpose Other Than Enjoyment
By Abi Mensahib
Anyone about to read this novel should know that there is not an unitary plot that follows a set of characters to a finality. Thus, you feel like it is very disjointed or fragmented, and you may even stop reading it because you can't settle in for a good, fluid read. You should know that it comprises a series of linked short stories or vignettes, and if you are knowledgeable of styles, be warned that it is a post-modernist novel, i.e., a novel in which there is a fragmented narrative, a kind of narration or narrator that isn't reliable, and this is especially true when trying to understand what the "known world" is to the slaves. Yes, it is a novel about slavery, but particularly about black slaveowners. Around 1860 28% of free blacks owned slaves as compared to 4.8% of southern whites so this is a very legitimate subject. However, the novel and its sources are not based on actual history. Only the 1806 Act passed in Virginia that is referenced is historically correct. Everything else is imaginary, made up, and the novel itself becomes a kind of metahistory of slavery. You don't read it to further your knowledge of historical slavery. You read it for its vivid fictional depictions of groups of slaves and the white functionaries they encounter. You read it because the stories are memorable. There is, of course, the brutality of slavery, but most readers know about that so you read to dwell in the humanity of the various groups of slaves, most of them families. The title of the book is "The Known World" so read this novel to learn what that means: what is knowledge, what or who generates it, can it be trusted, how does it impact individual slaves. With a theme to follow like knowledge, you will greatly enjoy the book, far more than if you just read the words on the page as it won't pick up steam for you. If you like the notion of short stories then read the author's two collections. I rate this novel all five stars but with the caveat laid out above. It would not, however, have been my choice for a Pulitzer Prize, but who knows what the competition was. The author himself does not give very enlightening interviews, but it is helpful to know that his beloved mother was completely illiterate. That fact obviously plays a big underlying role in the novel. This is not a novel you buy at the airport before a flight. That's not fair. Give it your full attention with a question,for it to answer such as I have suggested above.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An Absolute Masterpiece
By Omnivoreader
My daughter was reading this book in her high school English class and I decided to reread it so that I could discuss it with her while she was planning her paper. I listened to this on tape when it first was published, which was a few years ago. I was stunned all over again by how great this novel is. The sections are not chronological, but follow certain thematic arcs, often going back over information we already have gleaned from other chapters. I did not find this confusing at all, but felt rather that I was getting different versions of the same tale, as if from different points of view.
If anyone has a doubt about the insanity of the institution of slavery, this is the book to read. The narrative approaches the subject in a totally neutral and objective way, quoting the laws of the time and describing events without judgment, much the same way as Primo Levi approached his descriptions of Auschwitz. The calm and even-handed prose makes the reality of slavery all the more appalling. Here's something I didn't know: Northern insurance companies insured slaves. This was horrifying to me.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A wonderful novel on many levels
By Robert A. Hall
This novel was recommended in "The Week" news magazine by a "best books" list contributor. I had not read anything else by the author, Edward Jones, a Pulitzer Prize winner. It is a story of a little-known facet of American history, Southern free black slave owners before the Civil War and emancipation. (According to "Black Slave Owners" by Joseph Holloway on slaverebellion.org, there were 3,000 free black slave owners in New Orleans in 1860 and over 400 in Charleston, SC in 1830.) Americans, thanks to our "education" system, and a media and political class vested in creating a feeling of helpless victimhood in black Americans, tend to believe that slavery was purely a phenomenon of whites owning blacks for a few hundred years in the American south. In fact, as Dr. Thomas Sowell points out in his excellent essay, "The Real History of Slavery," every people were enslaved at some point, most often by folks just like them, and every culture accepted slavery and practiced it, until our much-maligned western culture turned against it. For example, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, which legally abolished slavery way back in 1981, has recently agreed with the UN to actually try to eradicate slavery. Sowell points out that during the same period when 500,000 African slaves were brought to what became the United States, a million white Europeans were kidnapped into slavery in Muslim North Africa. And there are no records of the millions of blacks taken into slavery by Muslims. I have read that white slaves were still being sold in Cairo 20 years after Lee surrendered to Grant. Getting a feel for this different perspective is one reason to read this novel. But the author's ear for dialog, eye for detail and command of the language will be the envy of other writers and a joy to readers. He creates life stories and a sense of place that make it had to accept that this is fiction. You can't help but believe that "this is the way it was." So it works on many levels. The only off-kilter note was his assertion that blacks didn't take surnames until after emancipation, a very small quibble. This is amply refuted, along with much of the demeaning but politically-valuable contemporary myth of blacks as helpless victims of slavery, in "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom." But, like that well-researched history, this novel presents blacks in slavery as a resilient and adaptable people coping as best they could with a great evil, and struggling to hold family together--doing a better job than a large percentage of Americans today, despite far easier conditions. I highly recommend it.
Robert A. Hall
Author: The Coming Collapse of the American republic
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