I know there is something bizzare about me because I didn't like this book. I know it has a lot of good reviews on here, so people should still give it a chance. Honestly, it is the first book this year I just couldn't finish. I made it halfway through hoping with each chapter that I would become interested in the story.

I think my major problem was the way the author laid the stories out. Nothing is in chronological order, and it's extremely confusing to being going back and forth in character's lives. Half the time I didn't know if things were happening in the present or past. It was just too much work and I began to feel dread every time I looked at the book. Maybe someday I will give it another chance. I just don't have the patience right now.

There’s irony that I read more than half of this wrenching, ugly, hopeful, stirring, and grievous book while holding a sleeping baby in my arms. Because there is a lot of life and death in this take on pre-Civil War Virginia.

I knew little about the book except that the author wrote it after reading about freed Black folks owning slaves. In delving into this issue, which in any modern conversation circle must bring dissonance, disbelief, and maybe even disgust, I became increasingly moved and disturbed.

A difficult book, both because it’s an unflinching look at slavery, but also because it’s written in a James Joyce-ish style — lots of asides and stream of consciousness text. The author careens from generation to generation and back again in often the same paragraph. Yet it worked for me. It reads like a memoir of an entire county’s 150-year history complete with dozens of families represented.

What results is simply, UNFORGETTABLE. There are characters whose faces I imagined while reading and characters whose stories I became invested in that will haunt me. Not in the truth of a fictional characterization but more because the ugliness of humanity was so blatantly on display and sadly remains real to this day.

As I bid farewell to the slaves, slaveowners, children of both and ministers, sheriffs and patrollers of this novel, I will not forget their names. And I can’t help but wonder who would I have been in Manchester County, Virginia?

Glorious account that gets past cliches. The premise is that two slaves in 1840s Virginia bought their freedom, but their son stayed a little too long under the master's care. What does the family do when the son starts his own farm and buys his own slaves? The mastery of Jones' writing comes in the sense of history that he lends to minute objects, chance encounters, and incantatory reveries within a frought landscape.

Not content to write an unwritten history of forgotten people, Jones re-writes the histories that have been written, citing documents the purport to explain the historical phenomenon of free blacks who owned slaves. Passages that carry runaway characters to the north also tie in academic treatises from the next century, deeds and warrants and court decisions that attempted to justify white supremacy, and the momentoes that emancipated children carry to their deathbeds. Jones doesn't neglect to include tales of individual transformation, collective redemption, or international implications in this epic. Characters may come and go like fleeting ghosts, yet the marks they leave may remain. When the words of the plantation master and deeds of the escaped overseer have faded into ineffectual memory, we readers are left with both the sense that an institution has gone horribly wrong and that the people within it can be honorably right; even if the results remain unapparent, the promise of future change remains, along with the threat of complacency and neglect.

Jones didn't attempt to detail the national debate over slavery that was current at that time. That limitation on his project was probably a good one. It allows us to see the human effects that rhetoric had covered, and allowed him to devote his attentions to demonstrating the range of positions that people could occupy in relation to the institution. Yes, whether you're descended from a slave, a master, a freed man, a black woman passing as white, an unwilling overseer, a treacherous deputy, a conscientious drunk, or an immigrant Irishwoman sold into prostitution, there's something in this book for you - and I wish that I was only joking, but the irony is that there is no irony here, and sincerity is the least of what we have to do, and memory is only the start of making a history that hasn't stopped.

Reading this novel of a small rural Virginian community in the decade before the Civil War was like watching a tango. The way the narrative spun into the future, lightly touching characters, before swinging back to the present, looped back around to lasso in someone or something lurking in the shadows was like a perfectly choreographed dance. This book explored the tensions between black and white, black slave and black slave owner, private and public morality, survival and longing, love and fear. The language was so smooth, not a false step.

Basically - a book about slavery in the South. I enjoy those kind of thing, especially The Secret Lives of Bees, but with this one, it felt like the book had no point. While I was reading, I kept on going "what did I just read? Am I really reading/understanding this book?" and kept on referring to the back cover of the book. No. The story was simply what I read. O.......K! Then ugh. I HATE leaving a book unread, so I kept on forcing myself to read thru the whole book. Finally the misery I was putting myself through ended, and UGH! The storyline. The author kept on jumping around the timeline too much - and honestly - I would describe this book as a glimpse of the lives of slaves in the south, but with a blah storyline. However this book has won a pultizer prize. EH!? Anyone out there who has read this book? Your opinions??

However like always, we learn from books. What I got out of this book was a new knowledge I never came upon, that black people owned black slaves.They even buy their own family members, and the slaves were considered as properties, including family. Hmm... History is richier than we will ever know or think of.

This book was one of the most interesting that I've read. Personally, I haven't read (or seen movies of) many slave narratives. I know the history, of course (growing up in the US, it's a very prevalent subject, for good reason) but I don't really know many of the complexities that kept the system in place. What was especially surprising was the knowledge that black slaveholders did exist in that time. This came as a big surprise to me. In this regard, it's an excellent book in the way of atmosphere. You could feel the stink that came from the system of slavery rotting through every person. Another thing to note is the gigantic cast of characters. This also made this novel unique from the rest of the novels I read for this course. There are at least 15 distinct characters; most with their own backgrounds. I found that it's best to just let it all wash over you instead of trying to intensively map it out in your head. If you're good at memorizing characters (and you live of Agatha Christie novels with large casts), then this is your book. If you can barely keep four characters straight, proceed with caution. It's such a complete universe, though, which makes the title all the more appropriate.

The Final Verdict:
There's a whole world that's described and the people inside this world only know it and nothing else. It's a really cool feeling and a very expansive and immersive book if you really get into it. Be prepared for some mental gymnastics, though.
4 stars

Ambitious, Interesting, Disorganized

In an interview, Edward P. Jones revealed that The Known World took shape around 1) when he heard that Black people had owned slaves and 2) when he read a thin paperback in high school about a Jewish man who decided to join the Nazi party, how he acted in opposition to how one would expect.

The Known World is an ambitious novel which aims to describe the world of 1855 where Henry Townsend has recently died. As a result of his death, a cloud of uncertainty hangs in the air as he leaves behind his widow, Caldonia, and the undetermined fate of the slaves he purchased to work his land.

Although the plot is interesting, this book is disorganized. It covers many different characters and rapidly shifts time periods. I would be reading along and then the text would say “and this person lived to be 93 years old and had 235 grandchildren.” (paraphrasing)

Countless times, I had to stop and reread because the storytelling was so clunky.

In The Known World, there are quite a few references to Adam and Eve, even references to Milton (Paradise Lost). My favorite author, Philip Pullman, loves to talk about this topic and how in his works he wanted his characters to find their way back to The Garden by taking the long way around.

So this quote on page 329 stood out:
“There was a long way around but he chose not to take it.”

There is a character in The Known World by the name of Anderson Frazier. He creates and distributes pamphlets and interviews Fern Elston. In my opinion, this pamphlet could have provided a framework to systematically organize the characters instead of the resulting jumbled and confusing soup of characters and timelines.

The Known World has some unforgettable moments, but the organization of the narrative reduces the enjoyment of the reading experience.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $13.87 on Amazon
Audiobook – 1 Audible Credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or roughly $9.56 per credit)

Connect With Me!
Blog Twitter BookTube Facebook Insta

Slavery is often depicted as a single, monolithic institution. The Known World in its exploration of slavery, especially slaveholding by free middle-class Blacks, shortly before the start of the Civil War, blasts this misconception wide open. Edward P. Jones starts small; The Known World initially appeared to be a series of unrelated very short stories, together going nowhere. Soon, however, it became clear that his stories were "unrelated" in the same ways that the pieces of a mosaic are (i.e., not at all unrelated). One anecdote highlighted and clarified another.

The Known World, then, is a series of stories braided together. Alice's nonsense rhymes were reflected in Augustus' refusal to hear or speak. Saskia and Thorbecke appeared only to bring about Counsel's fall. Although Jones' characters often lacked insight – "She had thought all that day that the three [escaped enslaved people] would return before nightfall, finding it difficult to believe that two women and a boy would leave what she and Henry had made" (p. 317) – his contrasting stories deepened our (my) understanding of slavery and Black enslavers. Calvin, whose mother had owned Blacks (her "legacy"), was opposed to the institution, yet wrote his slave-holding sister that he was "trying to make myself as indispensable as possible and yet trying to stay out of the way, lest someone remember my history [living with enslaving people] and they cast me out" (p. 386).

The Known World often appears to avoid emotion, but that's part of its beauty. As Jones says, "I don't like to use a lot of emotions or what I call 'neon-lighting' because almost all the time whatever I'm writing about has enough emotion in it, and all I have to do is tell the story" (Ellis, 2004). I think adding in cheap emotions would have sapped the book's true emotional depth. We (I) would have felt manipulated and resisted Jones, instead of spontaneously being appalled or angry or wondering about the moral questions raised, as Jones clearly wanted. "Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?" (p. 9). Or as Peter Jennings, then anchor for ABC News, said about reporting of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11/01: "Throughout my entire career, I have always been conscious that there are times when some people on television talk too much. Silence or natural sound on occasion is infinitely more powerful and relevant" (Graff, 2019, p. 152).

Although some of Jones' characters were clearly good (Celeste or Augustus) or evil (Travis or Counsel), most – Black and white – were morally ambiguous, as were the situations they found themselves in. As Augustus said, "I’ve had a little experience with this freedom situation. It’s big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time” (p. 49). I sometimes liked Moses and rooted for him, although often was yelling at him as he made one error followed by yet another. Similarly, "despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible. …'Render your body unto them,' his father had taught, 'but know your soul belongs to God'” (p. 43).

It's rarely that easy – as Skiffington discovered.

Their known world was often small, confining, and prevented real communication across racial and class lines. After Minerva disappeared, Winifred, who saw herself as Minerva's mother, put posters all over Philadelphia, asking for her return. The poster included the line, “Will Answer To The Name Minnie.” "[Winifred] had meant only love with all the words, for she loved Minerva more than she loved any other human being in the world. But [she] had been fifteen years in the South, in Manchester County, Virginia, and people down there just talked that way." Minerva heard a very different message and didn't see Winifred again for a very long time" (p. 382).

Sherry Ellis' (2004) interview of Edward P. Jones: https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_me...

A. O. Scott's (2024) interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/bo...

When one's husband tells one, "That's one of my favorite books of all time," one must read said book.

And I have absolutely zero regrets.

The Known World is the story of a slave-owning black (yes, really) family in the South some time before the Civil War. And while it's fictional, Jones based it on the real life, actual existence of free black people who owned slaves. And if that ain't a fascinating setup rife for complex character-building an story-telling, I don't know what is.

The most striking thing about this story is the narrative style. Master Henry was dead, to begin with (apologies to Dickens). This came as a surprise, as from the description, I assumed the black slave owner would be the main character. But no, this story is told in a non-linear way. We find out almost immediately that Henry Townsend, a black man freed as a teenager who grew up to keep other black people as slaves, is on his death bed. From there we jump back and forward in time, focusing on Henry, his parents, his former master, and all their relatives, neighbors, and friends in Manchester County, Virginia. While Henry is the fixed point around which all the events and characters revolve, he's not precisely the main character.

In fact, there is no main character, save for Manchester County. The main character is an unusual set of circumstances that grows into a situation perfect for examining racial supremacy and degradation. For there are no simple, straightforward characters here. Even the most evil character has pathos and an underlying vulnerability that humanizes him even after he has done the unthinkable.

The repeated themes throughout the novel are just gorgeous. "The Known World" as a phrase refers both to various maps and the theme of discovery. But also to what we understand about the world we live in. And in this case, it isn't much. Beyond the known world lies the knowledge that slavery is morally unjustifiable, that race is a lie, that the future will be different.

Death and rebirth are also strong themes in the book. Both in the literal deaths of several characters, but also in the transition from slavery to freedom (and back again, sadly). Particularly poignant was the spiritual rebirth of Stamford, an enslaved man who goes from a womanizing blowhard with no ambition to, after a traumatic storm, a community leader and living saint.

Race in America is fucking complicated. To suggest otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of history and current events. The Known World is a petri dish to examine those complications. For contrary to the basic understanding of the slave-owning South of most of this country's long and bloody history, it is not literally black (slaves) and white (slave-owners).

One of the things I learned while reading White Trash is that the rich have a tradition of pitting the poor against each other in order to maintain class boundaries by exploiting racial boundaries. And this is painfully clear in Jones's book. For there are free black characters who are wealthy and educated and feel like they have more in common with white slave owners than black slaves. And there are white people who abhor the practice of slavery but literally work to uphold it because "it's the law." And there are poor white people who can't afford a slave and are absolutely vicious in their racist victimization of black people, both free and enslaved.

And all of these people form a tight-knit community. The cognitive dissonance of a former slave owning people is addressed head-on in the form of Henry's parents, who not only disown him and dress him down the minute he buys his first slave, but who are secret conductors on the underground railroad. I loved Henry's parents for how clearly they exemplified the "Where did we go wrong?" complaint of parents everywhere... in the darkest fucking way possible. Their horror at watching their son indoctrinated into the class system of slave ownership is so, so sad to read.

And indeed, it's hard to understand how a former slave could enslave others. Especially when we're talking about the racist chattel-slavery of the Antebellum South. But class is complicated, and property rights are complicated. And Henry was raised more by his owner than his parents: one of the more interesting characters in the book. Henry's former owner treats him as a protege, and has himself two children by a black woman. He's honorable and kind, a "good slave owner" if there is such a thing. Henry identifies with William more than with his parents and the enslaved, uneducated black people around him.

This review is jumbled, but so are my thoughts on this book. I fucking loved it. I loved the wandering narrative style and the time the author took to flesh out each and every character, from Moses to Minerva. I loved the view characters took on after death, and the meandering way in which all roads came together at the end.

The last impression I got from the story, though, is one of sweet despair. For the wicked get away with horrible crimes, and the righteous die in the dirt. Only the good die young, or no good deed goes unpunished, or a thousand other platitudes. But what it comes down to is this: there is great power in the person who believes they are right. And he will forgive himself for just about anything.

Story of a Black slaveowner in Virginia shortly before the Civil War, his family, and his slaves. There is some beautiful writing here but I found it difficult to get pulled in due to the large cast of characters and wildly nonlinear storytelling. It’s so splintered that it’s hard to feel connected to the characters, and their depth doesn’t come into relief until rather late in the book.

Still, the payoff, while largely tragic, is worth it. By the last half of third of the book, a few characters emerge as protagonists — the Black slaveowner’s widow, Caldonia, who struggles to keep order on the farm after her husband dies; her overseer Moses, who makes some regrettable assumptions; the sheriff John Skiffington, whose faith in God and in the law clash as he fulfills his deeply racist duties, and whose desire to see the best in everyone has fatal consequences.

The deep entanglement between all these stories is astonishing, and part of what gives the book its power. The smallest event or encounter sets off chains of events that run through the story like filigree threads. Lives and deaths are interconnected across plantations, across states, across time. This is as true in life as in fiction, but I think we don’t always confront it in our daily lives; The Known World (such an evocative title in hindsight, the best kind of title) points at it and makes you think about it.

Set in the American South (principally Virginia) in the 1850s, this is an unusual novel on the theme of slavery. It's based on the intertwined stories of a disparate group of characters: black, white, Cherokee; free man, slave, and slaveowner, all of whom connect in some way to the "central" characters of Augustus Townsend and his son Henry. Augustus is a former slave and talented carpenter, who was allowed by his former owner to use his carpentry skills to earn money, and who eventually bought his own freedom and later that of his son. Henry later becomes a slaveowner himself, much to his father's anger and distress. I live in the UK and confess that until reading this novel I was completely unaware that free black people who themselves owned slaves did actually exist in the American South, something which I have seen confirmed in subsequent reading. At the same time the novel makes it clear that the free black population lived a precarious existence.

Initially I didn't take to this novel. In the early chapters I found the story disjointed and it was hard to identify with any of the characters, but gradually I found myself more and more drawn into it and to the fates of the characters. My initial impression of a two-star "OK" rating changed first to three and then to four by the end of the book. At times it was not an easy read; many of the characters suffer (or inflict) terrible cruelty and injustice, but for me the novel brought out the almost daily moral choices faced by everyone who lives in a society of slaves and slaveowners, even if they themselves fall into neither category.

[Review written in 2014, typos corrected 02/11/2020]

A brilliant and heart breaking story of life during slavery, and the multilayered ways that it corrupted and devoured everyone that came in touch with it. Absolutely brilliant, including how the author used a non-linear time frame, that confused me a lot at the start but by half way into the book it really clicked.