Blog

The Known World won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and the 2003 National Book Critics Award in fiction. It is a stunning story in that it imagines the reality and consequences of a free black man in pre-Civil War Virginia who owns slaves.

From the publisher:

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, 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. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.

A story from NPR.

Author’s Web site.

Jones will be in the Capital Region to give a reading with the New York State Writers Institute. April 18 (Wednesday): Novelist and short story writer Edward P. Jones
Reading – 8:00 p.m., Room TBA, Rensselaer (RPI), Troy

Thanks to Lisa Stevens for pointing out this book.

The previous authors and writings featured on this blog:
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”
Gwendolyn Brooks
August Wilson
“Our Nig” by Harriet Wilson
“Twelve Years A Slave” by Solomon Northup
“The Souls of Black Folks” by W.E.B. Du Bois
Langston Hughes
“Cane” by Jean Toomer
“The Great Negro Plot” by Mat Johnson
“Passing” by Nella Larsen
“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
“I Have a Dream” speech”
“Sula” by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s “Sula,” first published in 1973, was chosen as an Oprah book club pick in 2002. This is how the TV show’s Web site describes the book:

Nominated for the National Book Award, this rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines—from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.

Nel Wright chooses to remain in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, and to become a pillar of the tightly-knit black community. Sula Peace rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college and submerges herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel, a mocker and a wanton sexual seductress. Both women must suffer the consequences of their choices; both must decide if they can afford to harbor the love they have for each other; and both combine to create an unforgettable rendering of what it means and costs to exist and survive as a black woman in America.

What that fails to mention is found in a 1996 essay by Rita A. Bergenholtz from the African American Review “Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking”:

Toni Morrison’s ‘Sula’ succeeds as a satire for its entertainment and thought-provoking values. Binary thinking is likewise promoted and constitutes the novel’s essence. Through ‘Sula’, Morrison examines the apparent contradictions that are inherent in the perceptions and lifestyles of blacks toward whites and vice-versa. The characters in the novel exemplify the need for the binary perspectives of both races prior to some sort of mutual understanding.

(more…)