“I started out thinking I would read a whole bunch of books about slavery,” said Jones. “Jones has clearly done a tremendous amount of research to bring this time and place to life,” wrote John Freeman in the Boston Globe the USA Today critic expressed gratitude that his “historical novel” didn’t “become a tedious showcase for the author’s research.” As Jones irritably pointed out in later interviews, including one appended to the novel’s paperback edition, there was one problem with this interpretation: he had done almost no research whatsoever. So little was known about the subject of black slave owners, and so little had been written about it, that Jones’s novel about Henry Townsend’s plantation and its slaves was taken as a feat of historiographic revelation. Critics singled out for praise the novel’s depiction of black slave owners in the antebellum South, a largely overlooked and toxic fungus in the cellar of American history. The reviews greeting The Known World upon its publication in 2003 were uniformly rapturous, and, for Edward P.
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