Illuminating Fiction

Foreword to Early Draft: from The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

1 Foreword to Early Draft from The Known World, by Edward P. Jones It is with great delight and appreciation that I introduce the following excerpt from an early draft of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. This early section is included in Illuminating Fiction with the objective of showing not only the importance of the art and craft of fiction writing, but the importance of revision and the sculpting of a piece of work. One of the many things I’ve learned through conducting author interviews is that what an author chooses to keep in his work, the editorial path that he or she chooses, is as essential, if not more so, than the author’s initial vision. Jones initially planned on having a very long piece in The Known World about the character Stamford and Stamford’s life after slavery. In this section Stamford would live in Richmond with his wife Delphie and they would run an orphanage for black children. A poor German couple would perish in a fire and leave their infant daughter behind. No white family would take the baby in and Stamford and Delphie would care for her. They would ultimately travel to Germany to bring the child to relatives too poor to travel to America. Jones intended to concentrate on Stamford’s emerging sense that he was put on the earth to care for children. One can only imagine how The Known World would have been altered if Jones had chosen to include this passage and develop Stamford’s life in this manner. I thank Mr. Jones for his generosity for contributing this early draft of The Known World to Illuminating Fiction. ...