Colson Whitehead
1 book analyzed
Biography
Colson Whitehead (born 1969) is a Black American novelist from New York City. He attended Harvard and worked as a critic before publishing his debut novel in 1999. He has described The Underground Railroad as a book he had been thinking about for fifteen years but was afraid to write — afraid he wasn't good enough, afraid of what the research would require of him emotionally. He wrote it after Obama's presidency and published it in September 2016, two months before the 2016 election. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award simultaneously — only the second novel ever to do so (the first was The Color Purple). Barack Obama named it among his books of the year. Oprah selected it for her book club. Whitehead won a second Pulitzer for The Nickel Boys (2019), becoming only the fourth author in history to win two Pulitzers for Fiction.