The Known World

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner-2004 (Best Novel) 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 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 rumors 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 p...

Author: Jones Edward P.
ISBN: 60557559
Year of publication: 2004
Genre: Modern prose
Number of pages: 460
Reading time: 7 h. 40 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
Language: english
Requests: read online, download without registration, e-book