An inviting point of entrance into the truth seeking, genre defying
novels of the award-winning author
In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of
Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely
divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus
argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible
wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of
"stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize
winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him
on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to
reexamine--and frequently defy--accepted notions of truth.
Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found
within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through
2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions,
Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres
in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter,
again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom
as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of
American culture.
Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race
is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of
Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their
assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas
of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story,
the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction,
Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have
defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary
storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other
interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race,
class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of
identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.
