Colson Whitehead
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead was born and raised in Manhattan. He studied at Harvard, worked as a television critic for the Village Voice, and published his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999 — a genre-bending allegory about race and progress that announced a major new voice in American fiction.
Over the next two decades, Whitehead moved effortlessly between genres — writing zombie novels, poker memoirs, and literary fiction. His 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, which imagined the escape network as a literal railroad beneath the ground, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and was adapted into a series by Barry Jenkins.
In 2019, The Nickel Boys — inspired by the true story of a brutal reform school in Florida — won a second consecutive Pulitzer Prize, making Whitehead the first author to achieve that feat since John Updike in the 1980s. He received a MacArthur Fellowship and continues to expand the possibilities of what the American novel can be.
"I think there are so many different ways to write about the African American experience that we're just starting to scratch the surface."— Colson Whitehead
Key Milestones
A Life in Firsts
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