Not unlike Henry Townsend, the pair of men at the center of the book-the young, enslaved lovers Samuel and Isaiah-are part of an ensemble of characters filling out the economy of a cotton plantation, where the story is set.

Aside from sporadic scenes situated in the motherland of a far-gone past, “The Prophets,” like its Pulitzer-winning predecessor, meets the might of slavery’s unrepresentable facts with localness, a severe provincialism. (no relation to Edward), but I wondered, while reading it, whether Robert had thought of “The Known World” as he drafted his own book. Jones’s name doesn’t appear among the dozens of authors, artists, entertainers, and other luminaries-living and dead-called upon in the acknowledgments of “ The Prophets,” the début novel by Robert Jones, Jr. Set in a fictional county in antebellum Virginia, “The Known World” is an epic of slavery told through an onslaught of the banal though the book was marketed through its most sensational element-the character of Henry Townsend, an enslaved Black man who becomes a slave owner himself-its power lies in how it recounts the flurry of names, places, and interactions that constitute one node in a devastating American network. He was discussing a short story he’d written, “ Old Boys, Old Girls,” but the same could be said of “ The Known World,” Jones’s début and only novel to date, which had just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Jones said in a 2004 interview in The New Yorker. “A long, long time ago, maybe twenty or so years ago, I told myself that even if you have one page about a person eating his lunch you should have a history in your head,” the author Edward P. Photograph by Alberto Vargas / RainRiver Images Robert Jones, Jr.,’s début novel beckons forth ancestors of various kinds to lend the weight of their influence.

Robert jones the prophets