Colson Whitehead

Born November 6, 1969 in New York City, Colson Whitehead was raised in the borough of Manhattan and attended Trinity School before earning his degree in English and comparative literature from Harvard College in 1991. After graduation, Whitehead wrote media reviews for the Village Voice and worked on what would become his first novel, The Intuitionist (1999). A quasi-fantasy with elements of detective fiction, the novel combined a keen understanding of pop culture and genre with trenchant observations on history, race and culture, and earned stellar reviews, which established Whitehead as a talent to watch in American fiction. While working at an Internet company to pay off debuts incurred while writing The Intuitionist, Whitehead began research on the folk hero John Henry, which informed his second novel, John Henry Days (2001), about a journalist covering a festival devoted to the legendary railroad worker. The book was listed as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle, and preceded Whitehead's receipt of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. The Colossus of New York, a collection of essays about the city, followed in 2003, with his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, arriving in 2006. Whitehead continued publishing fiction to great acclaim, including the horror experiment Zone One (2011) and an imaginative work of historical fiction, The Underground Railroad (2016).