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Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the National Book Award. His second collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He has been an instructor of fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.
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Throughout The Known World, you intersperse your fictional account with historical records and data about Manchester County, Virginia. Are these records factual? What was your intent in incorporating them into your novel?
The county and town of Manchester, Virginia, and every human being in those
places are products of my imagination. Other counties and towns (Amelia
County, Charlottesville, etc.) are real, but were employed merely to give some
heft and believability to the creation of Manchester and its people. The same
is obviously true of real, historical people -- President Fillmore, for
example.
The census records I made up for Manchester were, again, simply to make the
reader feel that the town and the county and the people lived and breathed in
central Virginia once upon a time before the county was "swallowed
up" by surrounding counties. Saying that the census of 1840 shows that
there were so many black people, so many white people there, et cetera,
affords a hard background of numbers and dates that makes the foreground of
the characters and what they go through more real.
How unusual was it for free blacks to serve as slaveholders in the
South? How did the idea come to you to ...
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Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the ... (more)
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