Black slaveholders in antebellum Virginia. Jones's 2003 novel made visible a historical reality that most Americans had never confronted: that some free Black people owned slaves. The prose is quiet and omniscient, moving through decades in a paragraph. Won the Pulitzer. Jones, a famously private writer, spent ten years on it after losing an earlier draft in a flood.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.