Colson Whitehead

• Born: November 6, 1969
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Novelist and journalist

Biography

Colson Whitehead has been hailed as one of the United States’ most talented and innovative young writers. As a child growing up in New York City, he decided that he wanted to be a novelist after reading Stephen King’s novels. Whitehead matriculated at Harvard University; after he was not accepted into Harvard’s creative writing seminars, he studied English and comparative literature. Upon receiving a BA in 1991, he became an editorial assistant at The Village Voice; he wrote music, television, and book reviews and eventually became the newspaper’s television editor. While working at The Village Voice, he met and married Natasha Stovall, a photographer and writer. Whitehead’s essays have appeared in other publications, such as The New York Times, Vibe, Spin, and Newsday.

Whitehead worked for a time in San Francisco, where he wrote about internet events, and has taught in the University of Houston’s creative writing program as well as at various universities in Connecticut, New Jersey, Wyoming, and New York. Despite that, he is a self-described lifelong New Yorker. He and his wife made their home in Brooklyn. On September 11, 2001, Whitehead and Stovall stood on a hill in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park and looked out on lower Manhattan. They watched the World Trade Center’s two towers burn and collapse after the terrorist attacks of that morning. One of Whitehead’s most eloquent and memorable essays, “Lost and Found,” (The New York Times, November 11, 2001), pays tribute to the Twin Towers, New York City, and memories.

Whitehead continues to write essays, yet he is best known for his fiction. In his first novel, The Intuitionist, he pits an urban department of elevator inspectors’ two contentious groups against each other: the Intuitionists and the Empiricists. The novel’s protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is the first African American woman in the department. She is known as the most competent inspector until an elevator, inspected by her, freefalls. Elated Empiricists blame the accident on Watson, an Intuitionist. Determined to find out what happened, Watson investigates in a work that critics have described as a racial allegory, comic fantasy, and mystery.

The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1999, won the Quality Paperback Book Club’s 1999 New Voices Award and the 2000 Whiting Award in Fiction. The Intuitionist was published when Whitehead was twenty-nine; consequently, critics proclaimed that he was one of the most talented of the younger generation of writers. His debut novel garnered comparisons with novels by Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon. Excerpts from Whitehead’s novels began appearing in such anthologies as Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (2000), edited by Kevin Powell, and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), edited by Kevin Young.

The Intuitionist and Whitehead’s second novel, John Henry Days, focus on racial as well as gender issues. Whitehead became aware of John Henry, the legendary railroad figure, when he was an elementary school student. When Whitehead’s teacher showed his class a cartoon about Henry, Whitehead was intrigued. Although he had read Marvel Comics, John Henry represented a phenomenon Whitehead had never seen before—an African American superhero. Years later, Whitehead decided to write about Henry; however, he postponed beginning the novel until he felt capable of presenting the nineteenth-century folk hero differently from the image depicted in the various versions of the ballad of John Henry. Thus in his novel, Whitehead emphasizes Henry’s humanity rather than portraying him as a mythical figure. Henry, an Industrial Age figure, is contrasted with J. Sutter, a young, African American freelance journalist who represents the Digital Age and is sent to Talcott, West Virginia, to write about a three-day festival held in Henry’s honor.

The critical acclaim bestowed upon Whitehead’s second novel surpassed the favorable commentary conferred upon The Intuitionist. John Henry Days won the New York Public Library Young Lions’ Fiction Award in 2002 and the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award in 2004 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It was selected as the 2001 New York Times Editor’s Choice and was cited as the “Best Book of the Year” by reviewers at the Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and Salon. Established writers such as Ishmael Reed and John Updike acknowledged Whitehead’s talents as a novelist. The Intuitionist and John Henry Days also merited the attention of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Whitehead was one of twenty-four 2002 MacArthur Fellows awarded $500,000 "genius" grants.

Whitehead went on to publish five more books over the next dozen years: the essay collection The Colossus of New York (2003), as well as the novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a PEN/Oakland Award winner; Sag Harbor (2009), a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee; the best-selling Zone One (2011); and The Noble Hustle (2014). But his work would not attract as much critical attention again until the publication of The Underground Railroad (2016), another best seller in which he reimagines the titular real-life network of escape routes from slavery as a literal subterranean train. For his magical realist take on a vital piece of African American history, Whitehead won the National Book Award for Fiction, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His next book, The Nickel Boys (2019), proved nearly as successful, being long-listed for the National Book Award and earning him a second Pulitzer. The historical novel draws from true events that took place at a Black boys' reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida. In 2021, Whitehead released Harlem Shuffle, a crime thriller that takes place in 1960s-era New York City. In 2023, Whitehead released Crook Manifesto. The novel is a darkly comedic family saga that takes place in the same city as his previous novel, Harlem Shuffle, which is a fictional city under seige.

In addition, Whitehead received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 2013, and his body of work was recognized in 2020 when he was awarded the prestigious Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, becoming its youngest recipient to date. He has also served as the New York author laureate. In 2023, Whitehead was awarded the National Humanities Medal. The following year, Whitehead was granted the City College of New York's Langston Hughes Medal.

Whitehead and Stovall had a daughter before divorcing around 2011. Whitehead eventually married Julie Barer, a literary agent, with whom he had another child.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Intuitionist, 1999

John Henry Days, 2001

Apex Hides the Hurt, 2006

Sag Harbor, 2009

Zone One, 2011

The Underground Railroad, 2016

The Nickel Boys, 2019

Harlem Shuffle, 2021

Crook Manifesto, 2023

Bibliography

Albanese, Andrew. “Colson Whitehead Awarded 2020 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.” Publishers Weekly, 13 July 2020, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/83847-colson-whitehead-awarded-2020-library-of-congress-prize-for-american-fiction.html. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024. ‌

"Books—Colson Whitehead." Colson Whitehead, 2023, www.colsonwhitehead.com/books. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Franzen, Jonathan. “Freeloading Man.” The New York Times Book Review, May 13, 2001, 8.

Hill, Logan. “Whitehead Revisited.” New York Magazine 34 (May 7, 2001): 38.

Krist, Gary. “The Ascent of Man.” The New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1999, 9.

Mari, Christopher. “Colson Whitehead.” In Current Biography Yearbook 2001, edited by Clifford Thompson. New York: H. W. Wilson, 2001.

Porter, Evette. “Writing Home.” Black Issues in Higher Education 4 (May/June, 2002): 36.

"Pulitzer-Winning Author Colson Whitehead Is 2024 CCNY Langston Hughes Medalist." CCNY, 11 Jan. 2024, www.ccny.cuny.edu/news/pulitzer-winning-author-colson-whitehead-2024-ccny-langston-hughes-medalist?srsltid=AfmBOorpDG4Wzz6BD81fXuOLAAnSMoVsmWYiLodZd6VqC0R0VMjXS-yH. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

Reed, Ishmael. “Rage Against the Machine.” The Washington Post Book World, May 20, 1991, 5.

Updike, John. “Tote That Ephemera.” The New Yorker 77 (May 7, 2001): 87-89.

Whitehead, Colson. "Colson Whitehead on Historical Heists." Interview by Deborah Treisman. The New Yorker, 19 July 2021, www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/colson-whitehead-07-26-21. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Whitehead, Colson. “Tunnel Vision.” Interview by Daniel Zalewski. The New York Times Book Review, May 13, 2001, 8.