Why The Known World is a great novel

It's hard to overstate the significance and the excellence of Edward P. Jones's novel, The Known World (2003), which won a Pulitzer Prize plus other awards on its publication but at this point who's reading it? I honestly would put this novel among the great novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries; EPJ has written one of the rare encyclopedic novels that give a depiction of an historical era in a defined locale told through the life experiences of many characters whose fortunes life, die, and criss-cross. The closest analog would probably be A Hundred Years of Solitude and maybe - though this one focuses more on a single protagonist, The Leopard. Faulkner comparisons are also inevitable, particularly them mid-career "difficult" novels with multiple intersection plot lines, e.g. Light in August and Absalom!, Absalom!, as both are novels of the deeply segregated South, though obviously seen from differing vantages. The Known World establishes a fictional rural Virginia county (Manchester) ca 1840, and EPJ is particularly focused on the moral dilemmas and quandaries as well as the great pain and sorrow that confronted and overwhelmed so many people in that era, with reverberations down to our day. Among the many issues and conditions and raises and examines: A freed black man who runs his own plantation based on slave labor (to the furious anger of his father, a lifelong abolitionist) under the tutelage of the wealthiest and often brutally racist white plantation owners; a sheriff obligated to set up patrols to capture runaway slaves, which the law treats as property not as human beings; the internal politics on the plantation that often pit black against black depending on stature (house slaves v field slave, e.g.). This novel works so well because EPJ never descends to polemics or tendentious writing; he presents the many plot lines unadorned, and the readers must draw our own conclusions and observations. And the builds the novel on a series of dramatic, almost cinematic actions that converge at the end with some startling developments; EPJ also is able to step in and out of his own narration, often hitting a pause button and jumping decades ahead to fill us in on the fate of some of the central (or peripheral) characters. I think there are two reasons why The Known World is not as well-known as it should be: First, EPJ does nothing to make this novel easy for readers. Many characters and plot lines are introduced right at the start, w/ more to come, so it's exceptionally hard to keep characters straight; I would suggest taking extensive marginal notes (which I did) or perhaps finding - it must exist online - a plot and character summary. Second, EPJ hasn't published much - some very good stories but no other novel to date - over the 17 years since this debut novel. Productivity isn't everything - The Leopard was Lampdusa's only work, for ex. - but the lack of publication has kept EPJ out of the spotlight (or microscope) and has unfairly pushed EPJ and his great novel onto the sidelines.