by Edward P. Jones
Share
(Fiction; Amistad, 1992)
A great historical irony connects Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Known World, about black slave owners in antebellum Virginia and his literary debut, a story collection exploring the lives of black characters in modern Washington, DC: after slavery ended, millions of African Americans fled a Jim Crow subsistence life in the rural South hoping for a better life in the city, yet the majority of their offspring faced a meager existence of poor job opportunities, rigid segregation, and daily disappointments.