What if, in a rural, isolated corner of Mississippi, slavery didn’t end in 1865 but continued uninterrupted into the present? This is the chilling premise of Ronald L. Fair’s dark novel. In fictional Jacobs County, outsiders are rarely allowed in, and Black inhabitants attempting to escape are hunted down and killed.

Hope is kindled in the enslaved community with the birth of the “Black Prince,” a child celebrated for being “genuinely Negro” in a county in which Black women have long been subject to the sexual predations of white men. Secreted out of the county by his great-grandmother and a family friend, the young boy eventually makes his way north. Years later, his growing fame as a Chicago writer casts a spotlight on Jacobs County, setting in motion a series of events that will change everything for oppressor and oppressed alike.

First published in 1965, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most beautifully written books” of the decade. W. Ralph Eubanks’s introduction explores Fair’s extended metaphor for Black life under Jim Crow and reflects on the power of literature to excavate the legacy of slavery.

Ronald L. Fair (1932–2018) was the author of the novels Many Thousand Gone (1965), Hog Butcher (1966), World of Nothing (1970), and We Can’t Breathe (1972), as well as a collection of poetry. Increasingly disenchanted with American politics and culture, Fair left the United States in 1971 for Finland, where he became a sculptor.

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, and _The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the
American South_. He is the faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.