Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead at the 2009 Texas Book Festival.
Born November 6, 1969 (47 years old)
New York City, New York, United States
Occupation Writer
Nationality American
Genre Fiction, non-fiction
Notable works The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Zone One, The Underground Railroad
Website
colsonwhitehead.com

Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist. He is the author of six novels, including his debut work, the 1999 novel The Intuitionist, and the National Book Award-winning novel The Underground Railroad. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Personal life

Whitehead was born in New York City on November 6, 1969, and grew up in Manhattan. He attended Trinity in Manhattan. Whitehead graduated from Harvard College in 1991.

Career

After leaving college, Whitehead wrote for The Village Voice.[1][2] While working at the Voice, he began drafting his first novels.

Whitehead has since produced seven book-length works—six novels and a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of E.B. White's famous essay Here Is New York. The novels are 1999's The Intuitionist, 2001's John Henry Days, 2003's The Colossus of New York, 2006's Apex Hides the Hurt, 2009's Sag Harbor, 2011's Zone One, a New York Times Bestseller; and 2016's The Underground Railroad, which earned a National Book Award for Fiction.[3][4] Esquire magazine named The Intuitionist the best first novel of the year, and GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium."[5] Novelist John Updike, reviewing The Intuitionist in The New Yorker, called Whitehead "ambitious," "scintillating," and "strikingly original," adding, "The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead."[5]

Whitehead's The Intuitionist was nominated as the Common Novel at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The Common Novel nomination was part of a long-time tradition at the Institute that included authors like Maya Angelou, Andre Dubus III, William Joseph Kennedy, and Anthony Swofford.

Whitehead's non-fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's.[6]

His non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death was published by Doubleday in 2014.

He has taught at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.

In the spring of 2015, he joined The New York Times Magazine to write a column on language.

His 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, was a selection of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, and was also chosen by President Barack Obama as one of five books on his summer vacation reading list.[7][8]

Honors

For The Intuitionist

For John Henry Days

For Apex Hides the Hurt

For Sag Harbor

For Zone One

For The Underground Railroad

Works

Books

Fiction

Non-fiction

Essays

Short stories

References

  1. ↑ "Colson Whitehead". Colsonwhitehead.com. Archived from the original on 2008-03-06. Retrieved 2008-03-18.
  2. ↑ Nancy Smith (2012-07-17). "Interview with Colson Whitehead". The Rumpus. Retrieved 2013-05-17.
  3. 1 2 "The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, 2016 National Book Award Winner, Fiction".
  4. ↑ "Colson Whitehead". Pen.org. Archived from the original on 2007-06-10. Retrieved 2008-03-18.
  5. 1 2 John Updike, "Tote That Ephemera," The New Yorker, May 7, 2001.
  6. 1 2 "Colson Whitehead to be awarded Longwood's Dos Passos Prize for Literature". Longwood University. 2013-02-25. Retrieved 2013-05-17.
  7. ↑ Allie Malloy, "Obama summer reading list: 'The Girl on the Train'", CNN, August 12, 2016.
  8. ↑ Sarah Begley, "Here’s What President Obama Is Reading This Summer", Time magazine, August 12, 2016.

Further reading

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