Edward P. Jones on ‘The Known World,’ Still Acclaimed 20 Years After Publication

I had always assumed that “The Known World” was the product of prodigious, grinding research, but when I asked Jones about that part of the project he had a different story to tell. “By the time I started to think about the whole thing I had 40 books on American slavery,” he said. “And I’ll never forget this: The first book I started reading was about slavery in Virginia, and I read 50 pages. I think I got one or two nice facts. By the time I got to about Page 50, the will left me. So I stopped after that. The next year I picked it up, and I had to read the 50 pages again, and I stopped around the same place. And I’ve never been back to any of the books.”

My mistake had been assuming that the novel, which feels absolutely true on every page, was in some way an empirical achievement, rather than a triumph of imagination. Repeatedly in our conversation, Jones asserted the fiction-writer’s freedom — his delight and also his duty — to make things up.

This isn’t an absolute liberty. The laws of cause and effect, of time and space, must be observed. “I tell my students that this kind of thing is permissible,” Jones said, referring to the prerogatives of invention, “as long as you don’t have someone walking down the road in 1855 wearing a Rolex watch.”

“Another thing that I tell students,” he continued, “is that 5,000 years ago, people were doing awful things, and they’re doing awful things now, and 5,000 years from now they’ll still be doing awful things, if people are still around. People don’t change, so as long as you can zero in and get the emotion right, then you can throw in all the other stuff, and you don’t need to do a lot of research.”

Not that the contemplation of human awfulness is the whole of the job. The people in “The Known World” can be tender, brave and silly, qualities of the species that have also endured for thousands of years. What remains startling — what may explain the book’s enduring power more than anything else — is their vividness and variety.

The book took shape in Jones’s mind long before it emerged on the page. When I asked him, at the end of our conversation, about his writing process, he said he didn’t have one: “I do a lot of things in my head, and I haven’t done anything for a while. The hope is, once I get back to it, I just sit down and start working.” I look forward to that, and in the meantime, I will continue to marvel at the work he has already done.