Jones’s name doesn’t appear among the dozens of authors, artists, entertainers, and other luminaries-living and dead-called upon in the acknowledgments of “ The Prophets,” the début novel by Robert Jones, Jr. Set in a fictional county in antebellum Virginia, “The Known World” is an epic of slavery told through an onslaught of the banal though the book was marketed through its most sensational element-the character of Henry Townsend, an enslaved Black man who becomes a slave owner himself-its power lies in how it recounts the flurry of names, places, and interactions that constitute one node in a devastating American network. He was discussing a short story he’d written, “ Old Boys, Old Girls,” but the same could be said of “ The Known World,” Jones’s début and only novel to date, which had just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Jones said in a 2004 interview in The New Yorker. “A long, long time ago, maybe twenty or so years ago, I told myself that even if you have one page about a person eating his lunch you should have a history in your head,” the author Edward P. Photograph by Alberto Vargas / RainRiver Images Robert Jones, Jr.,’s début novel beckons forth ancestors of various kinds to lend the weight of their influence.
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