John Updike described Colson Whithehead as “ambitious”, “dazzling” and “surprisingly original”. He did it after reading “The Intuitionist.”
Time added significant value to Updike’s accolades. At the time of writing his review for The New Yorker, the writer of “Run, Rabbit” was the last to win two awards. Fictional pulitzer. Decades later, that emerging author he praised would become the next to accomplish such a feat.
Whitehead and Updike are two of the four to have succeeded. The others are William Faulkner Y Booth tarkington. The protagonist of this profile, who wants to be remembered as the “African American Stephen King”, obtained them for his novels “The Nickel Boys” and “Underground Railroad”.
Official poster of The Underground Railroad series.
These days Amazon Prime Video made a place for the series on one of these novels. The person in charge of bringing “Underground Railroad” to television in ten hours of footage was Barry jenkins. This is not a minor fact.
The filmmaker who literally snatched the Oscar from “La La Land” with “Moonlight” dedicates his art to making the racial problems of his country visible. It is next to Steve McQueen Y Jordan peele one of the current benchmarks in the field.
The same happens with Whitehead, but in novels. Racial issues support the arguments of the two titles that led him to be the writer of the moment.
“Underground Railroad” was recognized at the 2017 Pulitzers for being “a clever combination of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape into a myth that speaks of contemporary America.”
The story is set in the nineteenth century and focuses on the journey of two slaves from the southeastern United States who escape the cotton field in which they are made to work.
The concept of “underground railway” that gives the book its title refers to the safe escape route used by slaves who decided to venture out of their prisons. They were places where they could base their flight to the free states or Canada and not feel threatened.
And last year “The Nickel Boys” won. He did it because it was “a powerful story of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.” It is not very difficult to imagine, but it is worth clarifying that it is based on real events.
The author’s seventh novel closely follows the abuses suffered by a group of African-American children in a reformatory where they were taken for minor crimes.
Cover of “The Nickel Boys”, one of his award-winning books.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead It had a time when it was called Arch, another when it was called Chipp and another when it was called Colson, which is this.
He was born in New York, raised in Manhattan, and is the son of successful entrepreneurs at an executive recruiting company. At 51, life finds him married to a literary agent and with two children.
Princeton, New York, Houston, Columbia. He taught at all of these universities after graduating from Trinity School and Harvard in English philology.
Until the first Pulitzer, Colson had dedicated stories to an elevator operator, a man fanatic about naming things, his native New York, and Benji Cooper, one of the few African-Americans who study at an elite Manhattan high school.
Colson started working at The Village Voice newspaper.
Whitehead experienced firsthand the aftereffects of what African Americans suffered in one of his award-winning novels.
“Like many people, I was pulled over in a car for driving while I was black. They handcuffed me and interrogated me, ”he said in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio.
As a child he was taught that every time he left his house he had to know that he was a “target” and that he could not trust the police because they would immediately consider him “a bully”.
“That kind of casual abuse, which can often turn into lethal abuse, is definitely part of my American experience,” he said, drawing a parallel between the current era and what happened to the characters of “Underground Railroad.”
His new novel It will be published in September. It will take readers into their sixties. It is titled “Harlem Shuffle” and will offer a story of crimes that will renew the concerns of this alternative Stephen King.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/from-being-harassed-by-the-police-to-winning-two-pulitzers-the-story-of-colson-whitehead-the-writer-of-the-moment/
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