Word: novels
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...life and death of Henry Townsend, a black man, born a slave, who gains his freedom and becomes a slave master himself. How, the book asks, could a black man make another black man his property? Jones circles his subject warily rather than charging straight at it: the novel begins with Henry's death, then loops around to follow him from childhood. We meet Henry's former owner, who became his mentor, and his father, a good, dignified man who is horrified at what his son has become. We meet many of Henry's 33 slaves, including Moses, his moody...
BOOKS: A debut novel on slavery wins a Pulitzer...
...floor and put our feet up on the radiators to get warm." Jones is again sitting in the lobby of that building, but the library is now the City Museum of Washington, and Jones is 53 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Known World (Amistad; 388 pages). Time does have a way of changing everything...
...stayed there for 19 years. "When you grow up like that, having a job is important," he says. "It was always the job first. Writing would come second." But Jones hung on to his literary dreams, even though his co-workers joshed him about writing the great American novel. He lived alone, in the same apartment, watching TV--he's addicted to Judge Judy--thinking and writing...
...Jones published a collection of stories called Lost in the City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and he started thinking about doing a novel. He was haunted by something he had learned in college: Before the Civil War, some free blacks in the South owned slaves. He turned this fact over in his mind for almost 10 years, mentally charting out his fictional territory and populating it with characters. "I'd be thinking it through as I was living my life," he remembers. "I'm on the bus, I'm walking up and down the aisles of Safeway, you know...