Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is an author.
Colson Whitehead is an American novelist, the author of nine novels and two books of nonfiction. He started at the Village Voice writing about television, and his fiction has moved restlessly ever since: an elevator-inspector detective story, a zombie novel set in a quarantined Manhattan, a Harlem heist series, a book about playing poker on assignment. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for The Underground Railroad in 2017 and The Nickel Boys in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to do it, and The Underground Railroad also took the 2016 National Book Award. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.
Books (13)
- Crook Manifesto (2023)
- Harlem Shuffle (2021)
- Colson Whitehead Collection 3 Books Set (2020)
- The Nickel Boys (2019)
- The noble hustle (2014)
- Zone One (2011)
- Electric Literature No 2 (2009)
- Sag Harbor (2009)
- Apex hides the hurt (2006)
- The Colossus of New York (2003)
- John Henry Days (2001)
- The Underground Railroad (2000)
- The intuitionist (1999)
Where to start with Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad is the one to read first, the Pulitzer winner that makes the railroad literal and treats each state as a different American experiment. The Nickel Boys is leaner and harder, built on a real Florida reform school. The intuitionist is the debut and still his strangest idea, a Black elevator inspector inside a city arguing about how elevators should be judged. Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto are the fun ones.