Colson Whitehead

Over the course of his career, Colson Whitehead has produced a diverse eleven-book oeuvre that has made him one of the foremost 21st-century American literary authors. Born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead in New York on 6 November 1969, he spent his childhood and adolescence devouring pop culture—in particular, science fiction and horror films. His early years were generally divided between Manhattan and his family’s summer home in Sag Harbor on Long Island. In 1987, he began studying literature at Harvard University, where he befriended poet and editor Kevin Young and other members of the influential Dark Room Collective. After graduation, he spent several years in New York writing for the Village Voice, while also working on what eventually became his debut novel, The Intuitionist (Whitehead 1999, cited under Novels). Although his initial readership remained relatively small, Whitehead’s critical reputation grew quickly, with each of his first two books earning rave reviews and literary prizes. The Intuitionist was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction; his second novel, John Henry Days (Whitehead 2001, cited under Novels), won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2000, he received the Whiting Award and then followed that up with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (colloquially known as a “Genius Grant”) in 2002 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. Although his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (Whitehead 2006, cited under Novels), was less critically lauded, it nevertheless won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for outstanding multicultural literature. Over the next decade, Whitehead’s readership began to catch up with his critical acclaim and each of his subsequent five novels has landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Underground Railroad (Whitehead 2016, cited under Novels) has been his most noteworthy book to date, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list as well as earning him the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the National Book Award, and public endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, among others. He followed this success up with a short historical novel, The Nickel Boys (Whitehead 2020, cited under Novels), which was published with considerable fanfare and earned Whitehead both continued critical praise and further awards. Harlem Shuffle (Whitehead 2021, cited under Novels) and Crook Manifesto (Whitehead 2023, cited under Novels) are the first two installments of what Whitehead has called his “Harlem Trilogy” of crime fiction that surveys the complex social history of Harlem during the latter half of the twentieth century. Regardless of subject-matter or genre, Whitehead remains both a masterful prose stylist and a pointed social critic.