Colson Whitehead (born November 6, 1969, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American author known for innovative novels that explore social themes, including racism, while often incorporating fantastical elements. He was the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for consecutive books: the historical novels The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019).
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)
The third of four siblings, Whitehead grew up in Manhattan, and he enjoyed reading, especially comics and science fiction, from an early age. His parents owned an executive recruiting firm, and Whitehead attended Trinity School, a private school in New York City. After graduating from Trinity, he attended Harvard University. In college he joined the Dark Room Collective, a local group of young Black writers, several of whom went on to great literary success, including the poet Kevin Young and future U.S. poet laureates Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith. He graduated from Harvard in 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature. He then began writing movie, book, and television criticism for the weekly news and culture paper the Village Voice. He left that job in the late 1990s to concentrate on writing novels.
Whitehead blended suspense and fantasy in his first novel, The Intuitionist (1999). The story centers on Lila Mae Watson, a Black elevator inspector who does her job through intuition and psychic connection rather than scientific means. After being framed for an elevator mishap, she uses detective skills to unravel the conspiracy. In the book Whitehead explored issues revolving around race, gender, and social progress. The Intuitionist earned widespread acclaim, and it was followed two years later by John Henry Days (2001). The novel centers on a Black freelance journalist named J who travels from New York City to West Virginia for a festival dedicated to John Henry, a character from African American folklore. According to legend, John Henry was a Black railroad-construction worker who bet that he could drive a steel spike into solid rock as fast as a newly invented steel-driving machine. Although he won the race and the wager, he died from the exertion. In the book J compares John Henry’s struggle against the machine to J’s own desire to break the record for most consecutive days spent attending publicity events. Whitehead next published Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Sag Harbor (2009). The latter novel tells the story of a Black teenager who attends an elite private school and spends his summers vacationing with his wealthy family in the Hamptons in southeastern New York. As many critics noted, it drew upon Whitehead’s personal experiences and was his most personal work yet. In Zone One (2011) he described a postapocalyptic America in which people try to survive after a virus has turned some humans into zombies.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)
Whitehead received greater attention and critical acclaim in 2016 with the release of The Underground Railroad. In the novel, a slave catcher relentlessly pursues an enslaved girl who has escaped along actual underground railroad tracks—a reimagined Underground Railroad. Besides winning the Pulitzer Prize, Whitehead received the National Book Award for Fiction and the Booker Prize. His success continued with The Nickel Boys (2019). Based on real events, the book is set in 1960s Florida, which was then under Jim Crow laws that discriminated against African Americans. The story follows two Black teenagers who are sent to a juvenile reform school where they are physically and emotionally abused by administrators and teachers. The acclaimed work won several awards, most notably a Pulitzer and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. In 2021 Whitehead published the first book in his Harlem Trilogy, Harlem Shuffle, a crime novel that opens in 1959 and centers on a furniture salesman named Ray Carney who becomes involved in a scheme to rob a hotel. He followed up in 2023 with Crook Manifesto, which recounts Carney’s Harlem adventures in the 1970s.
Whitehead has also published nonfiction, notably The Colossus of New York (2003), a collection of essays about New York City, and The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (2014), a humorous dive into the 2011 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, in which Whitehead competed despite never before having played in a casino tournament.
During his career Whitehead has taught at colleges and universities throughout the United States. Among his other honors, Whitehead was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013). In 2020 he was awarded the U.S. Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.