Biography
Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music.
His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award.
John Henry Days followed in 2001, an investigation of the steel-driving man of American folklore. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The novel received the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
The Colossus of New York is a book of essays about the city. It was published in 2003 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) is a novel about a "nomenclature consultant" who gets an assignment to name a town, and was a recipient of the PEN/Oakland Award.
Sag Harbor, published in 2009, is a novel about teenagers hanging out in Sag Harbor, Long Island during the summer of 1985. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
Colson Whitehead's reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta.
He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Books
THE INTUITIONIST
"The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye."
--Walter Kirn, Time
"Ingenious and starkly original...Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, bit if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heading toward the upper floors."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Magical. . . . The Intuitionist ranks alongside Catch-22, V, The Bluest Eye and other groundbreaking first novels. . . . Whitehead shares Heller's sense of the absurd, Pynchon's operatic expansiveness and Morrison's deconstruction of race and racism." --San Francisco Chronicle
"The most engaging literary sleuthing you'll read this year. . . . What makes the novel so extraordinary is the ways in which Whitehead plays with notions of race."
--Newsweek
"Whitehead's prose is graceful and often lyrical, and his elevator underworld is a complex, lovingly realized creation."
--The New Yorker
"The Intuitionist is the story of a love affair with the steel and stone, machinery and architecture of the city. It's not a pretty love, but a working-class passion for the stench of humanity that its heroine, Lila Mae Watson, has made her own. But as always with love there is betrayal. This extraordinary novel is the first voice in a powerful chorus to come."
--Walter Mosley
JOHN HENRY DAYS
A narrative tour de force that astonishes on almost every page.” —Time
“Does what writing should do; it refreshes our sense of the world. . . . An ambitious, finely chiseled work.” --John Updike, The New Yorker
“John Henry Days is funny and wise and sumptuously written...compelling.” --Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review
“[Whitehead] takes on a multitude of issues with a rich and probing imagination. His reputation is likely to soar.” — Ishmael Reed, The Washington Post Book World
“A feast for famished readers.” — Newsweek
THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK
“A tour de force.” —Luc Sante, The New York Times Book Review
“Pitch-perfect. . . . Utterly authentic. . . . The Colossus of New York is quite simply the most delicious 13 bites of the Big Apple I’ve taken in ages.” --Grace Lichenstein, The Washington Post
“A love letter to New York. . . . Colossus illuminates innumerable little moments that define the city.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The cheapest, most stylish ticket to the Big Apple between two covers. . . . .It’s as if Whitehead’s scooped his pen into the collective unconscious of everyone who’s ever visited New York.” —Pittsburg Post-Gazette
“A revelatory ode to Gotham. . . . Whitehead’s engaged eyes and precise prose show us the small details we overlook and the large ones we fail to absorb.” —The Miami Herald
“Smooth, dazzling, evocative. . . . [Whitehead] writes wonderfully, commanding a lush, poetic, mellifluous prose instrument.” –The Nation
“[Whitehead is] a scientist of metropolitan encounters, he surveys places where the masses collide, knitting together hundreds of observations and calculations that usually remain unspoken. . . . The musical prose thrums with urban momentum.” —The Village Voice
“[Whithead’s] New York, like Walt Whitman’s or Thomas Pynchon’s or Woody Allen’s, is full of incantatory potential. Even the subway, ordinary, noisy, gruddy inevitability, becomes a ferry to the Underworld.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
APEX HIDES THE HURT
“Wickedly funny. . . . Whitehead is making a strong case for a new name of his own: that of the best of the new generation of American novelists.” —The Boston Globe
“A brilliant, witty, and subtle novel, written in a most engaging style, with tremendous aptness of language and command of plot.”
—The New York Review of Books
“Terrific. . . . Inspired. . . . Engaging, exuding energy. . . . Will have you nodding in wonder.” —The Miami Herald
“Dazzling. . . . Gorgeous, expertly crafted sentences. . . . An eloquent novel about racial identity in America.” —Newsweek
“Brilliant. . . . Exhilarating. . . . What keeps you reading this critique of language is its language, and our perverse delight in the ingenious abuse of words.” —The New York Times
