CANR
WORK TITLE: Crook Manifesto
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.colsonwhitehead.com
CITY: New York
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2017
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PERSONAL
Born November 6, 1969, in New York, NY; son of Arch and Mary Ann Whitehead; married Natasha Stovall (divorced); children: Madeline.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A., 1991.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Village Voice, New York, NY, television critic; New York Times Magazine, New York, columnist. Has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Wesleyan University, and New York University; visiting lecturer in creative writing at Princeton University; writer-in-residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.
AWARDS:Finalist, Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award for first fiction, and New Voices Award, Quality Paperback Book Club, both 1999, and Whiting Writers’ Award, 2000, all for The Intuitionist; Young Lions Fiction Award, New York Public Library, 2002, for John Henry Days; MacArthur “genius” grant, 2002; National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, both for John Henry Days; Notable Book of the Year citation, New York Times, 2003, for The Colossus of New York; PEN/Oakland Award, 2006, for Apex Hides the Hurt; Legacy Award finalist, Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, 2010, and PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, 2010, both for Sag Harbor; Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, 2012, for Zone One; John Dos Passos Prize, 2012; Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship; Guggenheim fellowship, 2013; National Book Award for Fiction and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, American Library Association (ALA), both 2016, and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Fiction, and Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, all 2017, all for The Underground Railroad; named the state author of New York by Governor Andrew Cuomo, 2018; Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2020, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, 2020, and Alex Award, YALSA/ALA, 2020, all for The Nickel Boys; Prize for American Fiction, Library of Congress, 2020; National Humanities Medal, 2021; Gotham Book Prize finalist, 2022, for Harlem Shuffle; Gotham Book Prize, 2024, and Edgar Award for Best Mystery finalist, 2024, both for Crook Manifesto; St. Louis Literary Award, Saint Louis University, 2025.
WRITINGS
Author of introduction to Agony, by Mark Beyer, New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2016. Contributor to periodicals, including Granta, Harper’s, New Yorker, New York, and New York Times.
The Intuitionist was optioned for film by director Jonathan Demme. The Underground Railroad was adapted as a miniseries by Amazon Prime in 2021, directed by Barry Jenkins. The Nickel Boys was adapted as a 2024 film by RaMell Ross, director and coauthor of the screenplay, and fellow coauthor Joslyn Barnes.
SIDELIGHTS
A generational talent writing ambitious, incisive, uncompromising novels, Colson Whitehead has penned several award-winning and critically acclaimed works, including two winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Prior to his second Pulitzer, Time contributor Mitchell S. Jackson recognized that Whitehead was “on his way to a landmark place in African-American history”; on its cover for the issue of July 8, 2019, Time hailed him as “America’s Storyteller.” Often devoting special attention to aspects of African American history in genre-crossing ways, his other novels include The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Sag Harbor, Zone One, and Harlem Shuffle. Writing in the London Guardian, Maya Jaggi described The Intuitionist as a “thrilling blend of noir and fantasy in the allegorical tale of an elevator inspector in pre-civil rights New York.” Jaggi noted that with John Henry Days, Whitehead “has waded into epic” with his “poignant, wittily observed and often gleefully comic” novel, which juxtaposes the nineteenth-century black folk hero who defeated a steam drill but died in the process with a modern freelance journalist covering the John Henry Days festival in West Virginia.
Whitehead, a native New Yorker, was raised alongside a brother just ten months apart in age, with whom he did most everything until their high-school years. As a young boy, he decided that he wanted to be a writer after reading a Stephen King novel. [open new]He took a measure of storytelling influence from the blaxploitation films that he started admiring, in the absence of other films with Black actors, around age seven, like Blacula. His escapes into film, fiction, and fantasy were sometimes spurred by the fearsome mood swings his father experienced when he drank heavily. With HBO a favorite channel at home, Whitehead was also inspired by comics and cultural commentators Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Although his parents were not activists, they took pride in having attended the famous 1963 March on Washington. Every summer during his youth, the family joined the Black vacationing community at Sag Harbor, in the Hamptons on Long Island.[suspend new]
Whitehead graduated from Harvard University in 1991 and then worked for several years as a television critic for the Village Voice. Speaking about his journalism experience with Salon contributor Laura Miller, Whitehead noted: “I think I got a lot of stuff out of my system. I learned some good habits from having to produce every other week and trying to make it fresh. Village Voice style back then encouraged the first-person—that sort of me-me-me stuff—and I worked through various preoccupations with pop culture.” Whitehead also kept busy writing fiction during his Village Voice years, and he completed a satirical novel of adult life in New York that nobody wanted to publish. “Even my agent dumped me,” he admitted to Daniel Zalewski in the New York Times Book Review.
Then one night in 1996, while watching a television program about defective escalators, inspiration hit. Whitehead, who had been reading hard-boiled detective novels, wondered if he could fashion an allegory about an equally hard-boiled escalator inspector. Changing the occupation to elevator inspector, Whitehead spent the next nine months writing The Intuitionist, the story of Lila Mae Watson, a black elevator inspector whose career is sabotaged by white coworkers. “On one level the novel was an homage to Dashiell Hammett,” wrote Zalewski, “but its supple racial metaphors earned comparisons to Ralph Ellison.” Set in a city that strongly resembles New York, The Intuitionist is an allegory dealing with rival schools of elevator inspectors, those who use intuition in their work, such as Watson, the first black woman in the profession, and those who use more hands-on techniques to detect flaws in the system, dubbed the Empiricists. It is election time at the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists are determined to do whatever it takes to show that the Intuitionists are on the wrong track; their primary tactic is to sabotage one of the elevators in Watson’s building. A day after inspection, an elevator in her building goes into free fall, a terrible disaster. In an attempt to clear her name, Watson in turn winds up in a search for the missing notebooks of the Intuitionists’ founder, James Fulton, who was working on a “black box”: a “perfect elevator” that would allow the city to construct buildings sky-high. Fuller’s blueprints for his foolproof elevator are in the missing notebooks, and whoever finds them will control the destiny of the city.
“Deftly and beautifully,” wrote Robin Brenner in the Rambles, “the story spins into a subtle exploration of so much more than the predictable points of politics and technology. Reminiscent of post-modern theory, Intuitionism and the debate over the soul and existence of elevators is illuminated as an intriguing argument that echoes the modern yearning for the streamlined sublime.” Brenner noted that Watson’s search for the blueprints to the mythical “black box” that will eliminate limits to upward mobility “almost echoes contemporary physicists’ search for a Grand Unified Theory of the universe. … The Intuitionist asks equally piercing and unsettling questions about identity, race, and through this warped mirror, our own less than honorable past.”
Critical reception to Whitehead’s debut novel largely followed Brenner’s assessment. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman, while comparing Whitehead’s work to that of George Orwell, Ralph Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon, also found it “resoundingly original.” Calling the story “mesmerizing,” Seaman noted that it is the author’s “shrewd and sardonic humor and agile explications of the insidiousness of racism … that make this such a trenchant and accomplished novel.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly similarly called the book “meaty and mythic” and commented that Whitehead “has a completely original story to tell, and he tells it well, successfully intertwining multiple plot lines and keeping his reader intrigued from the outset.” Joining the chorus of praise, Newsweek reviewer Veronica Chambers dubbed The Intuitionist “the most engaging literary sleuthing you’ll read this year,” while Time contributor Walter Kirn called the book “the freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.”
Whitehead’s second novel, a riff on the John Henry myth, is as genre-busting as his first, an attempt to “define the interior crisis of manhood in terms of the entire pop-mad consumer society,” according to a reviewer in the New York Times. In John Henry Days, the nineteenth-century African American folk hero who proved the equal of technology has earned a spot on a postage stamp to be commemorated in 1996. The ceremony, held in a small West Virginia town, draws a crowd of urban media types, including J. Sutter, a freelance journalist who will cover any event in the hope of free food and getting his expenses paid. Sutter is the only black journalist among this pack of hack writers, and he is personally staging his own John Henry-like competition to see how many such events he can consecutively cover. Also among the journalists is Pamela Street, whose father was an avid collector of John Henry memorabilia. Street and Sutter find a focus in one another, and the author even brings John Henry himself into the story as the narrative drifts back in time. Additionally, Whitehead introduces other characters inspired by the John Henry story, including the singer Paul Robeson, who played the “steel driving man” on Broadway.
Whitehead’s second novel was met by positive critical reaction, most of which applauded the epic scale of his endeavor. Not all reviewers felt, however, that Whitehead fulfilled the narrative’s potential. Writing in Esquire, Sven Birkerts remarked: “We anticipate a full-tilt grappling with myth, but instead Whitehead backs down, leaving us with the clatter and whir of failed connections, the reproachful silence of meanings left unexplored.” Entertainment Weekly contributor Troy Patterson called the novel an “odd gem—a novel of dazzling facets and glaring flaws,” while Time critic Paul Gray concluded that John Henry Days is “a narrative tour de force that astonishes on almost every page, but it generates more glitter and brilliance than warmth.”
Several critics greeted John Henry Days with even more praise than they had The Intuitionist. Zachary Karabell noted in his appraisal for the Los Angeles Times that Whitehead’s novel “works as a cascade of images and stories that intrigue and engage while remaining opaque, and yet, delicately, meaning emerges.” Malcolm Jones, reviewing the title in Newsweek, acknowledged that while John Henry Days is something of a “mess,” it is “a grand mess, one of those stories where the getting there is all the fun. Plundering the past, eviscerating the present, John Henry Days is a feast for famished readers.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman applauded the novel as an “even more sagacious tale” than Whitehead’s debut, calling it “inventive, funny, and bittersweet,” as well as “masterfully composed.” This “great American novel” explores dualities such as “nature and civilization,” “legend and history,” “black and white,” and “altruism and greed,” according to Seaman. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly similarly called the book “smart, learned and soaringly ambitious,” a novel that “consolidates … [Whitehead’s] position as one of the leading writers of serious fiction of his generation.” Reviewing John Henry Days in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Keith Gessen deemed it “an important book,” and New York Times contributor Jonathan Franzen described Whitehead’s second novel as “funny and wise and sumptuously written,” as well as an “aleatory fugue on the difficulty of manhood in an age that measures a man by what he buys or what he wears, not by his labor, not even by his human decency.”
Whitehead turned to nonfiction in 2003 with The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts, a collection of short pieces that “mix stream-of-consciousness with observational snapshots,” according to Book contributor Don McLeese. Drawing comparisons to E.B. White’s classic 1949 work Here Is New York, Whitehead’s volume has “both a loose chronological and a cyclical sense: morning to night, arrival and departure, birth and death,” observed a Kirkus Reviews critic. According to Philip Lopate, writing in the Nation, Whitehead “is treating New York directly as his subject matter, employing some of the classic organizing devices of the urban sketch, such as time of day (‘Morning,’ ‘Rush Hour’), season (‘Rain’), place (‘Subway,’ ‘Central Park’) and so on. It is moving to watch Whitehead patiently reworking these old tropes, fully conscious of his enterprise’s antiquarian aspects. And he writes wonderfully, commanding a lush, poetic, mellifluous prose instrument.”
The Colossus of New York earned strong critical praise, with several reviewers paying special attention to the author’s complex narrative technique. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman remarked that Whitehead “incisively distills the kaleidoscopic frenzy of the city into startlingly vital metaphors and cartoon-crisp analogies.” Luc Sante, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented that Whitehead’s volume “is a tour de force of voice, restlessly hopscotching from first to second to third person, from observation to speculation to reminiscence to indirect citation, in a staccato rhythm that effectively mimes the noise of the city,” adding: “The texture is like the flick of a radio dial across the band, if all the stations had achieved a mysterious unity of subject.” In the words of Library Journal reviewer Terren Ilana Wein, “this unique treatment of New York is … well, it’s very New York: beautiful, imaginative, textured, and vibrant.”
Whitehead returned to fiction with his 2006 novel Apex Hides the Hurt, “a smart tale about who we are under our labels,” noted Raina Kelley in Newsweek. The work concerns a corporate “nomenclature consultant” who devises names for consumer products, including a series of flesh-toned bandages known as Apex. The melancholic protagonist is called out of his self-enforced retirement to help rename the small Midwestern town of Winthrop. Though a local software entrepreneur favors New Prospera, the African American mayor and members of the city council want the town to revert to its original name, Freedom, in honor of the former slaves who founded it. “The periodically conventional mystery provides the novel’s forward motion,” observed New York Times Book Review critic David Gates, “but—and here’s the paradox—what keeps you reading this critique of language is its language, and our perverse delight in the ingenious abuse of words. Corporate-speak is an easy target, and Whitehead wastes little time on such sport.” Seaman, writing in Booklist, similarly noted that the author “archly explicates the philosophy of excess and the poetics of ludicrousness, and he incisively assesses the power inherent in the act of naming.” In Apex Hides the Hurt, remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Whitehead audaciously blurs the line between social realism and fabulist satire.”
Speaking with Walter Mosley in Book, Whitehead noted: “I feel my ideal reader is me at sixteen, or someone like me, who has just been reading the usual high school stuff and hasn’t been exposed to some kind of freaky postwar black literature. … Last week I did a thing for this Writers in Schools program in DC. The teacher had taught [John Henry Days] two days before and I went and talked about the book and the kids were incredibly smart and thoughtful. They seemed to get the book, they didn’t ask the same sort of questions I usually get. … They see me as the novelist guy, which I still have a hard time seeing myself as. I guess I am a novelist but they see me as a Novelist with a capital ‘N’.”
In 2009, Whitehead wrote his fourth novel, Sag Harbor, “another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice,” according to a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. The contributor added that it is “not as thematically ambitious as [his] earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.” Sag Harbor is a bildungsroman of a wealthy, African American prep school boy, Benji Cooper, who spends the summer of 1985 at his family’s retreat at Sag Harbor, New York, and emerges as Ben, a young man. The story is told in chapters, each self-contained, telling one story in Benji’s journey toward adulthood.
Bette-Lee Fox, in Library Journal, called it “wonderful, evocative writing, as always,” and expected that “male readers especially will relate.” It is in itself a unique book in that it “poses … existential literary questions” in a book “crowded with incident that is nevertheless resolutely devoid of plot,” explained a Los Angeles Times reviewer who also explained that the main questions about the book are: “Should something happen in a novel? Is plot a required element of fiction?” The reviewer suggested that that is the point of the book—to “capture how people really spend their summers, … a lot of tedium, a few insights, but not much to show for it.” Radhika Jones maintained in a review for Time that Whitehead got it right in a novel that “has tapped the most classic summer-novel activity of all: nostalgia. It doesn’t matter if nothing much happens in Sag Harbor, if in all the boys’ games with BB guns no one actually loses an eye. The pleasure is in the way Whitehead recalls it, in loving and lingering detail.”
In Whitehead’s next book, Zone One, a zombie apocalypse has ravaged the country, and New York City has been sealed off. Some of the zombies are aggressive and flesh-eating, while others are harmless wanderers.
Reviewing the work, Los Angeles Times contributor Chris Barton lauded: “As much as Whitehead was inspired by and occasionally references the ’70s disaster movies that share DNA with Zone One, it’s his remarkable turns of phrase that lift the story above the gory rubble of a midday matinee. Whether charged with bleak sadness or bone-dry humor, sentences worth savoring pile up faster than the body count.” Glen Duncan, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, assessed: “Stylistically the novel takes a while to settle. Shoot-from-the-hip phrases like ‘a weather-beaten broad who dispensed smiles beneath a slumping orange beehive’ sit uneasily alongside sub-Victorian constructions. … But once he finds his register, Whitehead writes with economy, texture and punch. He has a talent for sardonic aphorism.” New Statesman contributor Olivia Laing lauded: “This profoundly thoughtful novel is above all visual, creating its topography of the future with meticulous care. Among the many weirdly beautiful images, one stands out, both historically resonant and appropriate to the cobbled aesthetic of the end times.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman called the work “a deft, wily, and unnerving blend of pulse-elevating action and sniper-precise satire.”
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death is Whitehead’s nonfiction chronicle of events surrounding his participation in the World Series of Poker (WSOP), a book that a Publishers Weekly reviewer called a “loose-limbed jaunt through the world of high-stakes poker.” Whitehead held that he was a decent amateur poker player in pickup games with friends. Accordingly, the sports blog Grantland, which is associated with ESPN, staked him the 10,000-dollar entry fee for the WSOP, telling him that he could keep any winnings but requiring him to write freelance articles about his experience for the blog. Whitehead took them up on the deal, and while he did not win any money, he was able to write and sell The Noble Hustle. The book describes, often in mock epic terms, his training regimen: He would drop his child off at school, then ride a bus to New Jersey to practice his poker skills at a casino before returning home. He took yoga lessons. He devoured poker-playing manuals. He took part in minor tournaments in Atlantic City. He hired a poker coach. All of this preparation culminated in his trip to Las Vegas to enter the WSOP. Along the way, he engages in humorous riffs about the culture surrounding poker. He identifies what he calls the “Robotrons,” who acquired their skills through online gambling. He describes Las Vegas’s “Leisure-Industrial Complex,” where “your true self is laid bare with all its hungers and flaws and grubby aspirations.” He describes his own “Republic of Anhedonia,” a depressive, fatalistic state of mind that leads to the inability to feel pleasure and whose national sport is poker. Ultimately, the book allows the author to meditate on his identity, on writing, on his perceived inadequacies, and on his love of beef jerky.
A number of critics recognized that The Noble Hustle was a distinct departure by the author from his usual material—as a Kirkus Reviews contributor described it, “a minor work by a major novelist, a busman’s holiday, but engaging in its color and character.” Reviewers found the book praiseworthy for various reasons, but they were unable to take it entirely seriously. Steven Barthelme, in a review for the Washington Post Book World, wrote that the book contains “charm aplenty” but is perhaps slightly marred by “an incessant self-deprecation with a touch too much ‘self’ and an astonishing, unending miscellany [of cultural references] that might make Woolworth’s blush, if there were still Woolworth’s.” Barthelme concluded: “So The Noble Hustle is a valiant, often successful effort to overcome the dullness of vicarious gambling. … A shell game. By the end, the lightness or lack of overall substance, as if we’re walking away with nothing, makes the book a little disappointing. But it’s a charming jumble, finally, a not unpleasant read.” Similarly, Dwight Garner, in a piece for the New York Times Book Review, characterized the book as “a throwaway, a bluff, a large bet on a small hand. You can sense that he’s half embarrassed to be writing it. His language is so loose and sarcastic that reading it is like watching a guy try to toss playing cards into a hat.” Nevertheless, Garner went on to remark: “Whitehead is such a gifted writer, even when he doubles down on his calculated schlubbiness, that he nearly pulls this all off. You could point him at anything—a carwash, a bake sale, the cleaning of snot from a toddler’s face—and I’d probably line up to read his account.”
Other reviewers commented on the book in a more serious vein. The Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book an “engrossing mix of casual yet astute reportage and hang-dog philosophizing.” Mark Manivong, writing for Library Journal, concluded: “Entertaining and absorbing, Whitehead’s look at the subculture of gambling and casino tournaments will appeal even to nongambling readers.” Nick Romeo in the Boston Globe called Whitehead “a brilliant sociologist of the poker world” and admired his “cool but cultured prose.” Romeo went on to comment: “He evokes the physical atmosphere vividly. … But he also conjures the human terrain, laying bare his own psychology and imagining his way into the minds of others. His book affirms what David Foster Wallace’s best nonfiction pieces made so clear: It’s a great idea for magazine editors to turn a gifted novelist loose on an odd American subculture and see what riches are unearthed.”
The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a Georgia slave who escapes after being raped by her owner. Surreally, Cora travels north on actual train tracks that make up a fictional Underground Railroad. Along the way, she meets a variety of characters, both free people and other escaped slaves, and encounters a number of chilling, even terrifying, situations. This novel won Whitehead his first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In an interview with Michelle Dean, contributor to the London Guardian, Whitehead explained how he developed the concept for the book. He stated: “I was thinking about how when you’re a kid, when you first hear about the underground railroad, you visualize a literal subway. Just because the image is so evocative. … I thought, what if it actually was a subway.” In an interview with Publishers Weekly‘s Diane Patrick, Whitehead remarked: “On one level, this book is about a girl born into bondage who makes a great leap of faith to escape to a better life. … On another level, it’s about slavery, how it functioned and what it meant—to slaves, to their masters, to people in the South. Each state Cora goes through is a different state of American possibility: South Carolina is a benevolent, paternalistic state where slaves are given programs for racial uplift. North Carolina is a white supremacist state. So each is a sort of island, in a Gulliver’s Travels kind of way.” Commenting on the solemnity and gravity of the book, Whitehead told Boris Kachka, contributor to Vulture: “As I did more research, I wanted to honor all the people who had been in slavery, to the dead, to my ancestors. So even though I play with history and time, in terms of moving the Tuskegee syphilis experiments down and bringing the implications of the Holocaust in, I wanted the first chapter to be as realistic as I could do it. And yeah, it is a serious subject that didn’t seem to warrant my usual satire and joking.” Whitehead told Vogue writer Megan O’Grady: “I have a taste for absurdist set pieces and big, broad satirical scenes, and here, definitely, I felt once I settled into the book, I wanted to be more concise and not as flashy. … I wanted to let the work speak for itself, and not be so concerned with blowing the readers’ minds in an over-the-top way.”
Critics offered laudatory assessments of The Underground Railroad. Connie Ogle, reviewer on the Portland Press Herald hailed the novel as “a thrilling, relentless adventure, an exquisitely crafted novel that exerts a deep emotional pull. It’s an alternate history with a bite and a heart.” Ogle concluded: “A book like The Underground Railroad —a masterpiece, let’s just say it—can put our tattered, ugly past in perspective and maybe help us forge some kind of better future.” Writing for the New York Time Book Review, Juan Gabriel Vasquez commented: “In a sense, The Underground Railroad is Whitehead’s own attempt at getting things right, not by telling us what we already know but by vindicating the powers of fiction to interpret the world. In its exploration of the foundational sins of America, it is a brave and necessary book.” In Booklist Donna Seaman asserted: “Hard-driving, laser-sharp, artistically superlative, and deeply compassionate, Whitehead’s unforgettable odyssey adds a clarion new facet to the literature of racial tyranny and liberation.” A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked that Whitehead “continues the African-American artists’ inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank.”
Whitehead pressed his success to unprecedented levels with The Nickel Boys, published in 2019. It became his second consecutive novel to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020, and was later adapted into a film that earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. [resume new]The novel was inspired by the history of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, in Florida, where captive youths were horrendously abused. Whitehead learned of the school when the state’s attempts to sell the property in 2014 led to the discovery of unmarked graves, which archaelogy students exhumed in order to identify the former students. Whitehead was reminded of accounts of residential schools for indigenous people in Canada, which were also found to have both caused and covered up deaths of students, and felt compelled to novelize the Florida school.
The Nickel Boys opens with a present-day scene in which a secret graveyard is located on the grounds of Florida’s Trevor Nichol Academy. At the end of the Jim Crow era, “Nickel,” as youths called it, had a decent reputation as a reform school, though Elwood Curtis had no expectation of ending up there: an ethical straight-A student raised by his grandmother, he often listens to his LP of Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing, takes inspiration from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and is excited to enroll early at a Black college near Tallahassee. But when he accepts a ride to the school, the car turns out to be stolen, the police give him no quarter, and he ends up confined to Nickel. White as well as Black students reside there, but the segregated Black students especially are victimized, through food deprivation, physical torture, and sexual abuse. New friend Turner, streetwise and disillusioned with American institutions, points out that open defiance could get Elwood taken out back and disappeared. Elwood tries to take the high road and work his way into the authorities’ good graces, but the situation is untenable. In the words of a Kirkus Reviews writer, “Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny.” Interspersed among the historical chapters are scenes showing Elwood as an adult, still coming to terms with the trauma of his Nickel days.
A Publishers Weekly affirmed that Whitehead’s “brilliant examination of America’s history of violence is a stunning novel of impeccable language and startling insight.” The Kirkus Reviews writer found The Nickel Boys to demonstrate Whitehead’s “skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious, if disquieting whole,” and Donna Seaman in Booklist deemed the novel “tautly focused” and “gripping.” She affirmed that the “magnetic characters exemplify stoicism and courage, and each supremely crafted scene smolders and flares with injustice and resistance, building to a staggering revelation.”
Spectator reviewer Philip Hensher, noting the frequency with which Whitehead invokes mistaken-identity situations—which almost seem like tropes—asserted that “the genius of the novel is that mistaken identity was simply the condition under which black American men existed in relation to the structures of power. There are plenty of real-life cases in which an innocent black man was casually mistaken for another, and lynched. White America couldn’t be bothered to find out who was who. Along with the plain beauty of his prose, Whitehead’s achievement is in having thought long and hard about the implications of this indifference.” Hensher concluded, “This is a heartbreakingly good novel … a book which should last because of the elegant refinement of its treatment, and the harmonious and deeply affecting balance it strikes between real-life conditions, and the requirements of the finest and most penetrating art.”
In a Fresh Air review, Maureen Corrigan marveled at Whitehead’s ability to move from one Pulitzer-winning novel to another just as worthy, calling The Nickel Boys “a masterpiece squared, rooted in history and American mythology and yet painfully topical in its visions of justice and mercy erratically denied.” Corrigan declared that, with the juxtaposition between Elwood’s hopeful optimism and the novel’s conclusion, Whitehead “issues a complex and deeply affecting verdict on whether or not the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice. But my verdict, so to speak, on The Nickel Boys is much more straightforward—it’s a great American novel.”
As a sort of release valve after the heavy subjects of his previous two books, Whitehead turned his attention to crafting crime novels, opening his historical “Harlem Trilogy” with Harlem Shuffle. Opening in 1959, the novel finds Ray Carney, owner of a used furniture store on happening 125th Street, doing his best to balance between the heritage of his criminal father and his own straight-laced aspirations. His wife’s upper-middle-class family have their doubts, which seem partly justified as Ray sometimes travels downtown to sell the jewelry that feckless cousin Freddie happens to “find.” The scheme is taken to the next level when Freddie and accomplices plan a heist to rob the Hotel Theresa, the “Waldorf of Harlem,” and things start going dreadfully wrong. Crooked cops, local gangsters, and wealthy white people running the city get rolled into the drama leading up to the pivotal Harlem riots of 1964.
Observing that Whitehead “lets fly with a typically crafty change-up” with his first crime novel, a Kirkus Reviews writer admired how “this most eclectic of contemporary masters never repeats himself, and his new novel is as audacious, ingenious, and spellbinding” as his previous works. The reviewer praised the “Dickensian array of colorful, idiosyncratic characters” as well as the “densely layered, intricately woven rendering” of early 1960s New York City. In Booklist, Bill Ott commented that Whitehead delivers a portrait of historical Harlem “brushed with lovingly etched detail” and featuring a “wonderful panoply of characters who spring to full-bodied life, blending joy, humor, and tragedy.” Ott deemed Harlem Shuffle “a triumph on every level.” BookPage’s Arlene McKanic called it “yet another Colson Whitehead masterpiece.”
The “Harlem Trilogy” advances to the 1970s with Crook Manifesto, which finds Ray Carney generally risen above the underworld but leaning into a connection with a sketchy cop to score tickets to the Jackson Five for his daughter in 1971. As the decade proceeds, Carney’s worldview is counterbalanced by philosophizing Pepper’s devotion to his “crook manifesto,” while burgeoning auteur Zippo aims to strike gold with his blaxpoitation flick “Nefertiti T.N.T.,” filming in the furniture store. Carney’s wife and charming children, the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army, and a steady stream of shady characters enliven the milieu leading up the quintessentially commercialized American bicentennial in 1976.
About the ongoing trilogy effort, Whitehead told Adrienne Westenfield of Esquire, “In this series, I feel like I’m drawing on a lot of different themes from my career. It’s about New York, it’s about systems, it’s about corruption and racism and the failure of institutions. All of those things I’ve been working on in different ways in different books.”
BookPage reviewer Carole V. Bell hailed Crook Manifesto as a “heady and riveting mashup of politics, culture, family life and crime that only a talent of Whitehead’s stature could so seamlessly blend.” In the New York Times Book Review, Walter Mosley proclaimed the novel a “dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game.” Mosley opined that Whitehead “bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny. … At other times, Whitehead gives his characters the quiet and room to issue forth the sound of such deep regret and resignation: of being trapped, of all the odds stacked against them, even from within.” Mosley declared that Whitehead nails his depiction of the era—“the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss”—as Crook Manifesto “gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.” Seaman concluded in Booklist that Whitehead “captures the menace and the beauty of the city in exhilarating detail within the many-faceted, rollicking plot that propels” this “magnificently vibrant and transcendent” novel.[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Whitehead, Colson, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2014.
PERIODICALS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 24, 1999, Laura Wexler, “Intuitionist Rises and Falls, Twisting Clichés with Glee,” p. L12; June 3, 2001, Mark Luce, “Regarding John Henry,” p. D4.
Black Issues Book Review, May-June 2002, Evette Porter, “Writing Home,” p. 36; January-February 2004, Herb Boyd, review of The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts, p. 58; May-June 2006, Christopher Jack Hill, “Literary Landscapes,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 32.
Bomb, summer 2001, Suzann Sherman, “Interview with Colson Whitehead,” pp. 74-80.
Book, May 2001, Walter Mosley, “Eavesdropping,” p. 44; November-December 2003, Don McLeese, review of The Colossus of New York, p. 82.
Booklist, December 1, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of The Intuitionist, p. 651; April 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of John Henry Days, p. 1536; September 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of The Colossus of New York, p. 4; February 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, “Walkabout, New York Style,” review of The Colossus of New York, p. 944; January 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 64; February 15, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of Sag Harbor, p. 5; August 1, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Zone One, p. 38; June 1, 2016, Donna Seaman, review of The Underground Railroad, p. 37; March 1, 2019, Donna Seaman, review of The Nickel Boys, p. 38; June 1, 2021, Bill Ott, review of Harlem Shuffle, p. 42; May 1, 2023, Donna Seaman, review of Crook Manifesto, p. 26.
BookPage, September, 2021, Arlene McKanic, review of Harlem Shuffle, p. 19; August, 2023, Carole V. Bell, “Colson Whitehead Continues to Explore History through Propulsive Heist Narratives That Go Far Beyond Crimes and Cover-Ups,” p. 14.
Boston Globe, March 19, 2006, Saul Austerlitz, “Identity Crisis,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, September, 2019, T.L. Stowell, review of Conversations with Colson Whitehead, p. 53.
Ebony, April 2006, “Topshelf,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 26.
Entertainment Weekly, May 18, 2001, Troy Patterson, review of John Henry Days, p. 74; October 24, 2003, Troy Patterson, review of The Colossus of New York, p. 111; March 24, 2006, Jennifer Reese, review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 74.
Esquire, May 2001, Sven Birkerts, “Carry That Weight,” p. 30; March 2006, Douglas Danoff, “The Talented Mr. Whitehead,” p. 78.
Guardian (London, England), June 23, 2001, Maya Jaggi, “Railroad Blues,” p. 10.
Houston Chronicle, March 29, 1999, Peter Szatmary, “An Intuitionist’s Over-the-Top Elevator,” p. 23.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2003, review of The Colossus of New York, p. 959; January 1, 2006, review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 15; February 23, 2009, review of Sag Harbor; August 1, 2011, review of Zone One; April 1, 2014, review of The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death; May 1, 2016, review of The Underground Railroad; February 1, 2019, review of Nickel Boys; July 1, 2021, review of Harlem Shuffle; May 1, 2023, review of Crook Manifesto.
Library Journal, October 15, 1999, Dan Bogey, review of The Intuitionist, p. 132; April 1, 2001, Ellen Flexman, review of John Henry Days, p. 135; August 1, 2003, Terren Ilana Wein, review of The Colossus of New York, p. 84; January 1, 2006, Bette-Lee Fox, review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 106; March 15, 2009, Bette-Lee Fox, review of Sag Harbor, p. 99; April 15, 2014, Mark Manivong, review of The Noble Hustle, p. 84; July 1, 2016, Barbara Hoffert, review of The Underground Railroad, p. 82.
Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2001, Zachary Karabell, “Heartache Delicately Circles Old Tale of Man versus Machine,” review of John Henry Days, p. E3; October 30, 2011, Chris Barton, review of Zone One.
Nation, December 1, 2003, Phillip Lopate, “New York State of Mind,” review of The Colossus of New York, p. 31.
New Republic, July 24, 2001, Chloe Schama, “The Name Game,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 36; August 6, 2001, James Wood, “Virtual Prose,” p. 30.
New Statesman, October 3, 2011, Olivia Laing, review of Zone One, p. 58; September 15, 2023, “‘In the US, We Throw Up Statues of Any Old Dimwit’: Colson Whitehead, Novelist,” p. 62.
Newsweek, January 11, 1998, review of The Intuitionist, p. 66; January 11, 1999, Veronica Chambers, “Love at First Sight,” p. 66; May 21, 2001, Malcolm Jones, “Whitehead Hammers out a Hit,” p. 59; March 13, 2006, Raina Kelley, “When the Name Game Isn’t Just a Game,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 61.
New Yorker, May 1, 2006, “Briefly Noted,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 87.
New York Observer, July 23, 2001, Adam Begley, “Air Miles and Press Junkets, Consumerism and Coincidence,” p. 19.
New York Review of Books, November 2, 2006, Darryl Pinckney, “Branding in America,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 56.
New York Times, December 2, 2001, “Editors’ Choice,” review of John Henry Days, p. 12.
New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1999, Gary Krist, “The Ascent of Man”; May 13, 2001, Jonathan Franzen, “Freeloading Man,” pp. 8-9, Daniel Zalewski, “Tunnel Vision: Interview with Colson Whitehead,” pp. 8-9; October 19, 2003, Luc Sante, “Eight Million Reasons,” review of The Colossus of New York, p. 38; April 2, 2006, David Gates, “You Are Now Entering—,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 12; October 30, 2011, Colson Whitehead, review of Zone One, p. 21; July 23, 2023, Walter Mosley, “Simple as Do, Re, Mi,” review of Crook Manifesto, p. 9.
People, March 27, 2006, Kyle Smith, review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 53; May 18, 2009, “Books,” review of Sag Harbor, p. 47.
Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), May 27, 2001, Frank Bentayou, “PR, Puffery Face Off with a Hero of Legend,” p. I11.
Poets & Writers, March-April 2013, Megan Hein, “Hurston/Wright Foundation, Legacy Awards,” p. 126; July-August 2013, Megan Hein, “John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,” p. 99.
Publishers Weekly, November 16, 1998, review of The Intuitionist, p. 56; March 22, 1999, review of The Intuitionist, p. 28; April 16, 2001, review of John Henry Days, p. 43; May 26, 2003, review of The Colossus of New York, p. 57; January 30, 2006, review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 40; June 20, 2011, review of Zone One; February 10, 2014, review of The Noble Hustle, p. 74; April 11, 2016, review of The Underground Railroad, p. 36; July 25, 2016, Diane Patrick, author interview, p. 27; February 11, 2019, review of The Nickel Boys, p. 44; May 29, 2023, review of Crook Manifesto, p. 92.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer 2001, Keith Gessen, review of John Henry Days, p. 155.
San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 2001, David Kipen, “Whitehead Gives Life to John Henry,” p. B1.
Spectator, July 27, 2019, Philip Hensher, review of The Nickel Boys, p. 26.
Time, January 25, 1999, Walter Kirn, “The Promise of Verticality,” p. 78; May 21, 2001, Paul Gray, “A Ballad for All Times,” p. 91; March 20, 2006, Lev Grossman, “The Third-Novel Curse,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 117; May 4, 2009, Radhika Jones, “Dag!,” review of Sag Harbor, p. 53.
Times Literary Supplement (London, England), January 15, 1999, Sam Gilpin, review of The Intuitionist, p. 21; August 19, 2001, Mark Greif, review of John Henry Days, p. 19.
USA Today, March 30, 1996, Bob Minzesheimer, “Apex Is the Height of Excellent Writing,” p. 5D.
Utne Reader, November-December 1998, Jon Spayde, “The New Faces of Fiction,” pp. 69-75.
Vanity Fair, April 2006, Elissa Schappell, “Hot Type,” review of Apex Hides the Hurt, p. 106.
Vulture, August 2, 2016, article about The Underground Railroad.
Washington Post Book World, June 21, 1999, Brian Gilmore, “Race to the Top,” p. 3; May 20, 2001, Ishmael Reed, “Rage against the Machine,” p. 5.
ONLINE
Arts Beat, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/ (May 29, 2014), John Williams, “Surviving at the Poker Tables: Colson Whitehead Talks about The Noble Hustle.
Boston Globe, http://www.bostonglobe.com/ (May 6, 2014), Nick Romeo, review of The Noble Hustle.
Colson Whitehead website, https://www.colsonwhitehead.com (September 25, 2025).
Esquire, https://www.esquire.com/ (July 18, 2023), Adrienne Westenfeld, “Colson Whitehead Knows the Secret to Reinvention.”
GQ, http://www.gq.com/ (September 6, 2016), Kima Jones, author interview.
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (August 17, 2016), Michelle Dean, author interview.
Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/ (April 26, 2009), review of Sag Harbor.
New York Times Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/ (April 27, 2009), review of Sag Harbor; (May 8, 2014), Dwight Garner, “A Poker-Faced Nihilist, Stoically Slumming,” review of The Noble Hustle; (May 15, 2014), “Colson Whitehead: By the Book,” author interview; (August 5, 2016), Juan Gabriel Vasquez, review of The Underground Railroad.
NPR website, http://www.npr.org/ (May 7, 2014), Terry Gross, “From Poker Amateur to World Series Competitor in The Noble Hustle”; (July 16, 2019), Maureen Corrigan, “Rooted in History, ‘The Nickel Boys’ Is a Great American Novel”; (August 26, 2022), Terry Gross, “Colson Whitehead Returns to His Home Turf with ‘Harlem Shuffle'”; (June 5, 2024), Terry Gross, “Colson Whitehead Channels the Paranoia and Fear of 1970s NYC in ‘Crook Manifesto'”; (January 17, 2025), Dave Davies, “Colson Whitehead Shares the True Story of Abuse and Injustice behind ‘Nickel Boys.'”
Portland Press Herald (ME), http://www.pressherald.com/ (August 21, 2016), Connie Ogle, review of The Underground Railroad.
Powell’s Books website, http://www.powells.com/ (June 14, 2001), Dave Welch, “Interview with Colson Whitehead.”
Rambles, http://www.rambles.net/ (April 30, 2002), Robin Brenner, review of The Intuitionist.
Random House website, http://www.randomhouse.com/ (July 27, 2014), “Colson Whitehead.”
Salon, http://www.salon.com/ (January 12, 1999), Laura Miller, “The Salon Interview: Going Up.”
Time, https://time.com/ (June 27, 2019), Mitchell S. Jackson, “‘I Carry It Within Me.’ Novelist Colson Whitehead Reminds Us How America’s Racist History Lives On.”
Vogue, http://www.vogue.com/ (August 18, 2016), Megan O’Grady, author interview.
Vulture, http://www.vulture.com/ (September 16, 2016), Boris Kachka, author interview.
Washington Post Book World, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (May 3, 2014), Steven Barthelme, “The Nobel Hustle.”
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.
Zone One (2011), about post-apocalyptic New York City, was a New York Times Bestseller.
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death, a non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker, appeared in 2014.
The Underground Railroad was published in the summer of 2016. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was a #1 New York Times Bestseller.
The Nickel Boys is a novel inspired by the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Harlem Shuffle, the first book in the Harlem Trilogy, was published in September 2021. Crook Manifesto, the second installment, appeared in 2023, and won the Gotham Book Prize for best book about New York City, and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery.
Cool Machine, the conclusion of the trilogy, will be published in 2026.
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 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
In 2018, New York State named him their New York State Author, and in 2020 the Library of Congress awarded him their Prize for American Fiction. In 2021, he received the National Humanities Medal.
He lives in New York City.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Colson Whitehead
Whitehead at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas
Whitehead in 2014
Born Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead
November 6, 1969 (age 55)
New York City, U.S.
Occupation Writer
Education Harvard University (BA)
Genre Fiction, non-fiction
Notable works The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), Zone One (2011), The Underground Railroad (2016), The Nickel Boys (2019)
Notable awards National Book Award for Fiction (2016)
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2017 and 2020)
Spouse Julie Barer
Children 2
Website
colsonwhitehead.com
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead[1] (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice.[2][3] He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Early life
Whitehead was born in New York City on November 6, 1969, and grew up in Manhattan.[4] He is one of four children of successful entrepreneur parents, his father Arch and mother, Mary Anne Whitehead who owned an executive recruiting firm.[5][6][7] As a child in Manhattan, Whitehead went by his first name Arch. He later switched to Chipp, before switching to Colson.[8] He attended Trinity School in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard University in 1991. In college, he became friends with poet Kevin Young.[9]
Career
After graduating from college, Whitehead wrote for The Village Voice.[10][11] While working at the Voice, he began drafting his first novels.
Early in his career, Whitehead lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.[12]
Whitehead has since produced 11 book-length works—nine novels and two nonfiction works, including a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of E. B. White's famous 1949 essay Here Is New York. Whitehead's books are The Intuitionist (1999); John Henry Days (2001); The Colossus of New York (2003); Apex Hides the Hurt (2006); Sag Harbor (2009); 2011's Zone One, a New York Times bestseller; 2016's The Underground Railroad, which earned a National Book Award for Fiction; The Nickel Boys (2019);[13][14] Harlem Shuffle (2021); and Crook Manifesto (2023). Esquire magazine named The Intuitionist the best first novel of the year, and GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium".[15] 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."[15][16]
The Intuitionist was nominated as the Common Novel at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The Common Novel nomination was part of a longtime tradition at the Institute that included such authors as Maya Angelou, Andre Dubus III, William Joseph Kennedy, and Anthony Swofford.
Whitehead's nonfiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's.[17]
Whitehead at the 2011 Brooklyn Book Festival
His nonfiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death, was published by Doubleday in 2014.
Whitehead has taught at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Wesleyan University. He has been a writer-in-residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.
In 2015, he joined The New York Times Magazine to write a column on language.
The Underground Railroad was a selection of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, and was chosen by President Barack Obama as one of five books on his summer vacation reading list.[18][19] In 2017, the novel was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction at the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.[20] Colson was honored with the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for fiction presented by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation.[21] The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Judges of the prize called the novel "a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America".[22]
Whitehead's seventh novel, The Nickel Boys, was published in 2019. It was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where children convicted of minor offenses suffered violent abuse.[23] In conjunction with its publication, Whitehead was featured on the cover Time magazine's July 8, 2019, edition, alongside the strap-line "America's Storyteller".[6] The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[24] Judges of the prize called the novel "a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption".[25] It was Whitehead's second win, making him the fourth writer to win the prize twice.[26] In 2022, it was announced that Whitehead will executive produce the upcoming film adaptation of the same name.[27]
Whitehead's eighth novel, Harlem Shuffle, was conceived and begun before he wrote The Nickel Boys. It is a work of crime fiction set in Harlem during the 1960s.[6] Whitehead spent years writing it, and finished it in "bite-sized chunks" during the months he spent in quarantine in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.[28] Harlem Shuffle was published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021.[29] Crook Manifesto, Whitehead's ninth novel and a follow-up to Harlem Shuffle, was published on July 18, 2023.[30]
Personal life
Whitehead lives in Manhattan and also owns a home in Sag Harbor on Long Island. His wife, Julie Barer, is a literary agent. They have two children.[31]
Honors
2000: Whiting Award
2002: MacArthur Fellowship
2007: Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars Fellowship
2012: Dos Passos Prize[17]
2013: Guggenheim Fellowship
2018: Harvard Arts Medal[32]
2020: Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction[33]
2023: National Humanities Medal
2024: Langston Hughes Medal
Literary awards
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Year Work Award Category Result Ref
2000 The Intuitionist PEN/Hemingway Award — Shortlisted
Whiting Awards Fiction Won
2001 John Henry Days Los Angeles Times Book Prize Fiction Shortlisted
National Book Critics Circle Award Fiction Shortlisted
Salon Book Award Fiction Won
2002 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Fiction Shortlisted
Pulitzer Prize Fiction Shortlisted
Young Lions Fiction Award Fiction Shortlisted
2008 Apex Hides the Hurt PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award — Won
2010 Sag Harbor Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Fiction Shortlisted
PEN/Faulkner Award — Shortlisted
2011 International Dublin Literary Award — Longlisted
Long Island Reads — Won
2012 Zone One Hurston/Wright Legacy Award — Shortlisted
2016 The Underground Railroad Booklist Editors' Choice Adult Audio Won
Goodreads Choice Awards Historical Fiction Won—1st [34]
Kirkus Prize Fiction Shortlisted
National Book Award Fiction Won [35]
2017 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Fiction Won
Arthur C. Clarke Award — Won
Audie Award Audiobook of the Year Shortlisted
Literary Fiction & Classics Shortlisted
Female Narrator Shortlisted
BCALA Literary Awards Fiction Honor
Booker Prize — Longlisted
Books Are My Bag Readers' Awards Novel Won
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize Fiction Won
Clark Fiction Prize — Won
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Fiction Shortlisted
Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award — Shortlisted
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Fiction Won
Indies Choice Book Awards Adult Fiction Won
John W. Campbell Memorial Award — Shortlisted
Locus Award Science Fiction Novel Nominated
NAACP Image Awards Fiction Shortlisted
PEN/Jean Stein Book Award — Shortlisted
Pulitzer Prize Fiction Won
TCK Publishing Reader's Choice Award Novel Won
2018 International Dublin Literary Award — Longlisted
2019 The Nickel Boys Foyles Books of the Year Fiction Shortlisted
Goodreads Choice Awards Historical Fiction Nominated—2nd [36]
Kirkus Prize Fiction Won [37]
National Book Award Fiction Longlisted [38]
National Book Critics Circle Award Fiction Shortlisted
2020 Alex Award — Won
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Fiction Longlisted
Aspen Words Literary Prize — Longlisted
Audie Award Male Narrator Shortlisted
BCALA Literary Awards Fiction Won
BookTube Prize Fiction Quarterfinalist
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Fiction Shortlisted
Orwell Prize Political Fiction Won [39]
Pulitzer Prize Fiction Won [40]
The Writers' Prize — Longlisted
Lincoln Award — Nominated
2021 Harlem Shuffle Booklist Editors' Choice Adult Audio Won
Goodreads Choice Awards Mystery & Thriller Nominated—6th [41]
Hammett Prize — Shortlisted
Kirkus Prize Fiction Shortlisted
National Book Critics Circle Award Fiction Shortlisted
2022 BookTube Prize Fiction Octofinalist
Gotham Book Prize Fiction Shortlisted
Macavity Award Mystery Novel Shortlisted
NAACP Image Award Fiction Shortlisted
New York City Book Award — Won
Works
Fiction
—— (1999). The Intuitionist (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385492997.
—— (2001). John Henry Days (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385498197.
—— (2006). Apex Hides the Hurt (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385507950.
—— (2009). Sag Harbor (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385527651.
—— (2011). Zone One (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385528078.
—— (2016). The Underground Railroad (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385542364.
—— (2019). The Nickel Boys (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385537070.
—— (2021). Harlem Shuffle (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385545136.
—— (2023). Crook Manifesto (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385545150.
—— (2026). Cool Machine (hardcover 1st ed.).
Non-fiction
—— (2003). The Colossus of New York (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385507943.
—— (2014). The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death (hardcover 1st ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385537056.
Essays
"Lost and Found". The New York Times Magazine. November 11, 2001.
"A Psychotronic Childhood". The New Yorker. June 4, 2012.
"Hard Times in the Uncanny Valley". Grantland. ESPN. August 24, 2012.
"Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia". Grantland. ESPN. May 19, 2013.
Short stories
"Down in Front". Granta (86: Film). Summer 2004.
"The Gangsters". The New Yorker. December 22, 2008.
"The Match". The New Yorker. April 1, 2019.
"The Theresa Job". The New Yorker. July 26, 2021.
Colson Whitehead channels the paranoia and fear of 1970s NYC in 'Crook Manifesto'
June 5, 202411:17 AM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
35-Minute Listen
Transcript
Hear the Original Interview
Author Interviews
Colson Whitehead channels the paranoia and fear of 1970s NYC in 'Crook Manifesto'
"My early '70s New York is dingy and grimy," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author says. Whitehead's sequel to Harlem Shuffle centers on crime at every level. Originally broadcast July 24, 2023.
Sponsor Message
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Colson Whitehead won Pulitzer Prizes for two consecutive novels. The first Pulitzer was for "The Underground Railroad," an allegory about race in America told through the stories of an escaped slave and a slave catcher. It was adapted into an Amazon series. The second Pulitzer was for "The Nickel Boys," based on the true story of a state reform school for boys in which the boys were physically abused and dozens died. A film adaptation starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Daveed Diggs is expected to be released in October. After writing about those grim subjects, Whitehead started writing crime novels set in Harlem. These novels gave him the chance to write snappy dialogue laced with witty observations, while writing about class and race, as well as crime and corruption at every level from petty criminals to cops, city politicians, and Harlem's Black elite.
"Harlem Shuffle," the first novel in his projected Harlem trilogy, was set in the '60s. The following novel, "Crook Manifesto," takes place 1971-76. It was published last summer and came out in paperback this week. "Crook Manifesto" brings back the main character, Ray Carney, the owner of a furniture store on 125th Street in Harlem, who takes pride in upgrading his customers' living rooms with comfortable quality sofas and recliners. But it's the money he's earned fencing stolen goods that's enabled him to move from a cramped apartment to the home he owns on Harlem's Strivers' Row. But fencing got him deeper into crime than he was prepared for. In the opening of "Crook Manifesto," he's been retired from crime for four years. But when his daughter insists that she needs tickets to the Jackson 5 concert, but he learns they're sold out, he goes to the person he's confident can get him a pair - a corrupt white cop. By asking for a favor, Carney is forced to perform one in return, which leads him to become the unwitting accomplice to a murder. The novel's characters include a leader of the revolutionary group the Black Liberation Army, the producer of a Blaxploitation film, and a groundbreaking comic who seems to be based on Richard Pryor. Sirens from police cars and fire trucks are the background noise throughout the book.
We recorded our interview last summer when "Crook Manifesto" was first published.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: Colson Whitehead, welcome back to FRESH AIR. It's so great to have you back again, and I'm so glad you wrote a sequel (laughter) to "Harlem Shuffle" because it's really such an enjoyable series. So I want to start by asking you to read a section from the first chapter of the book. Just to set it up, why don't you explain the scene? Set the scene for us.
COLSON WHITEHEAD: Sure. It's the opening of the book, 1971, and Ray Carney, our furniture store owner/part-time fence is having a normal day of business, which means there's a lot of noise and crazy activity outside on 125th Street in Harlem. He has a sales assistant named Larry, who is trying to reel in a customer named Mr. Foster.
(Reading) Another siren. Business, orderly business, unfolded inside the walls of Carney's Furniture. But out on the street, it was Harlem rules - rowdy, unpredictable, more trifling than a loser uncle. The siren zipped up and down the aves as regularly as subway trains, all hours, per calamity's timetable. If not the cops on the mayhem mission, then an ambulance racing to unwind fate, a fire engine speeding to a vacant tenement before the blaze ate the whole block, or en route to a six-story building kerosened for the insurance, a dozen families inside.
(Reading) Carney's father had torched a building or two in his day. It paid the rent. This was a radio car siren. Carney joined Larry and Charlie Foster at the window. On the other side of 125th, two white officers hassled a young man in a dark denim jacket and red flare trousers, their vehicle beached on the sidewalk. The cops pushed him up against the window of Hutchins Tobacco, known for its cigarettes without tax stamps and for its vermin problem. The 125th Street foot traffic bent around this obstruction in the stream. Most did not stop. Nothing special about a roust - if not here, somewhere else.
(Reading) But the manhunt had people edgy and off their routines. They lingered and muttered to one another, sassing and heckling the policemen, even as they remained at a distance that testified to their fear. The taller cop swept the man's feet apart and patted the inside of his legs. What'd he do? Carney said. They pulled up, tackled him like he robbed a bank, Larry said. Acting crazy, Charlie Foster said, looking for those Black Panthers. Black Liberation Army, Larry said. Same thing. Carney didn't want to interrupt when there was a fish on the line, but the disagreement between the Panthers and the offshoot Black Liberation Army was about more than names. The philosophical dispute encompassed the temperament of the street, law enforcement's current posture of vis-a-vis Harlem, and all the sirens. Step back, and maybe it contained everything.
GROSS: That's Colson Whitehead reading from his new novel "Crook Manifesto." It's interesting that you get in, like, the Panthers versus the Black Liberation Army, like, by page nine (laughter). And the impression I get, you know, from that passage is that the Panthers and the BLA - they're making headlines. But to the people in Harlem and the people who work at Ray Carney's store and to Ray Carney himself, it's confusing what the difference is and their revolutionary politics isn't meaning very much to the people in Ray's world.
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, I mean, it's 1970, 1971, and there's this rift in the Black Panther Party. How do we actually get things done? Can we work within the American system or do we want revolution? And so the Black Liberation Army has splintered off. They're robbing banks, allegedly. They're taking credit for shooting at policemen. And there's a manhunt sort of disturbing the rhythm of people's lives. What's going on? Why are all these policemen sort of cruising around our neighborhood even more than usual? And it's in this moment of rupture that I pick up Carney's story a couple of years after the first book, "Harlem Shuffle," and he has to navigate this mess.
GROSS: Why did you want to pick it up there?
WHITEHEAD: I had a system where the first book would be about the '60s and the second about the '70s, and I'm trying to find moments that - of opportunity, you know, for storytelling that speak to Carney's dilemma in this world. What's next for him? Which way is he going to jump? The same way the Panthers are at this moment of inflection. Where is the city going? Crime is at an all-time high. We're looking down at a fiscal crisis that's coming down the pike. So New York is in a place of change as well. And so I picked 1971, 1973, and 1976 because each offers a different sort of opportunity to drop Carney and his supporting cast in a different place.
GROSS: The Black Liberation Army, in your novel, is in with some corrupt cops in terms of expropriating (laughter) money from businesses and banks. So, were they together in the real world - members of the Black Liberation Party (ph) and corrupt cops who were willing to steal money or get payoffs in order to do what they wanted to do?
WHITEHEAD: Well, there're incredibly corrupt cops in New York in 1971. It's the year of the Knapp Commission, a big police corruption investigation that people might have heard of through "Serpico." Is there a documented link between police in real life and the Black Liberation Army? I invented it. I think different points in the lives of different cities like New York and Los Angeles, you do get that sort of more direct collusion. The crime in this book that Detective Munson, this sort of white corrupt cop, is engaged in is invented, as far as I know.
GROSS: Do you feel like you're smearing the BLA by doing that?
WHITEHEAD: (Laughter) I think, you know, they're sort of cagey about what they were up to in the early '70s - even still, even after they've - you know, some of them have fled to Cuba or served their prison sentences. So I'll let their - I'll let them sort of speak for themselves.
GROSS: Ray Carney's son asks him about the difference between the BLA and the Panthers. And, you know, the father says, well, the Panthers are about reform, and the Black Liberation Army is about revolution. It's kind of the difference between, you know, like, the sofas and the recliners that I sell on the store and the Castro convertible, which was a revolution. And the Castro convertible was, I think, like, the first couch that converted to a bed. And the father says, you know, Castro convertible. You open it up and, poof, you know, like, your living room is a bedroom. It's a revolution (laughter). And I think, like, what a hilarious way of explaining it.
WHITEHEAD: He's always bringing things back to furniture, you know? And I think that's one of the fun things about the book, is that he's not your typical criminal. Everything is filtered through his work, his needs, his idea of what an upstanding member of the community is. And definitely if he's looking for a metaphor, it's going to be drawn from his showroom. And that's something that repeats a lot, and it's the filter for his world.
GROSS: The way he gets back into crime is that his daughter says, you promised you'd get me tickets to the Jackson 5, but there are no tickets left. And she says, but you promised. So even though they're sold out, he knows that Munson, this corrupt white cop, knows how to get things that are ungettable. So he leans on Munson to get the tickets, but in return, Munson wants him to fence some jewels, like $2,000 - no, I'm sorry, $200,000 worth of jewels. And that's what gets Carney in over his head.
WHITEHEAD: He's retired. And I think one of the tropes of this kind of story is that when the criminal retires, forces conspire to bring him back in. And in this case, it's the Jackson 5, who are at the height of their early fame. They're going on tour with the Commodores, playing Madison Square Garden. And like any good father, Carney wants to get those tickets for his daughter. And then, of course, complications ensue. And he's caught up in this Knapp Commission hysteria, the Black Liberation Army's criminal shenanigans. And we take it from there.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guess is Colson Whitehead. His new novel is called "Crook Manifesto." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN COLTRANE QUARTET'S "OUT OF THIS WORLD")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Colson Whitehead. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his novels "The Underground Railroad" and "The Nickel Boys." His new book, "Crook Manifesto," is a crime novel set in Harlem in the '70s. It's a sequel to his novel "Harlem Shuffle," which was set in Harlem in the '60s. Their main character, Ray Carney, is a furniture store owner in Harlem who also fences stolen jewels, and more, and keeps getting deeper into crime.
Clothes figure prominently in the new book. This is, after all, the 1970s, the era of big collars and big hair (laughter) and jumpsuits and the color orange. And you wrote, the flamboyant quotient in Harlem was at a record high. The line between the stylish and the pimpified was unstable, ill-defined. The men on the corner were pimps, no doubt (laughter). So, and then - yeah, talk about that line between, you know, what pimps were wearing and what everybody was wearing.
WHITEHEAD: Well, I mean, I think, you know, that stereotypical image of the pimp was actually real. If you, you know, go back and look at photographs of people in the lifestyle, anything that was crazy and outrageous that teenagers and hip young 20-somethings were wearing was taken to synthetic-fabric extremes in pimp style. So I am trying to recreate an early 1970s that I recognize. You know, I think when I was 5 or 6 and look at pictures of me when I was 5 or 6, I really think, what was I wearing? Like, the colors are so crazy. It seems like such an otherworldly costume. And, of course, you know, the pimps took it to a different extreme.
I find myself, in trying to recreate the '60s and '70s, finding different ways to bring the reader in. I think the reader remembers that period of time and their own excesses, and hopefully they're, you know, painting themselves in these different scenes.
GROSS: I was glad you worked in blaxploitation films of the period, and one of the characters is making one, and one of the small-time criminals becomes the security guard. So you had to figure out what was the plot going to be for the blaxploitation film that you were creating. So talk about doing that.
WHITEHEAD: Well, yeah, there are, you know, different strands of blaxploitation films. There's the criminal. There's the Shaft-like private detective. And then there's a whole genre of secret agents, Black secret agents who can take down the Aryan industrialists, but also talk the language of the street. And my protagonist, Nefertiti T.N.T., falls into this last category.
There are different kinds of blaxploitation crime stories. There were private eyes like Shaft. There are criminals on the rise, as in "Superfly" and "Black Caesar." And then there were Black secret agents who could karate-chop German industrialists with Nazi sympathies and also talk the language of the street and save the community center. So my - the hero of my blaxploitation film in this book is Nefertiti Jones, Nefertiti T.N.T. And she works within a system, which sort of nods to our earlier talk about reform but is also fighting for revolution. She's a Black sleeper agent in the white power structure, and so that theme of reform and revolution sort of swims through different parts of the book and the blaxploitation movie within the book.
GROSS: What are some of the films you watched again or watched for the first time to get in the spirit?
WHITEHEAD: I mentioned "Black Caesar," which is a crime lord's rise. "Blacula" was very important to me as a young kid. There weren't a lot of films with Black actors growing up, and so I gravitated, as a 7-, 8-year-old, to a lot of blaxploitation films, and I remember Blacula, with his, you know, incredible Afro, his incredibly stylish digs, biting the necks of young LA unfortunates. A lot of the stuff doesn't hold up. You know, I think I sort of adored it as a distorted reflection of Black life when I was a kid, lacking other depictions. In my 20s, I thought that - you know, I found it very campy and loved watching old blaxploitation. And then I had to figure out what I could use for my book, and I find that - maybe just older, but a lot of pleasure has gone; or, you know, there's so many other Black actors, writers doing great work that I didn't have to, you know, heap all my hopes upon this early-70s run of Black exploitation fare.
GROSS: So give us an example of what made you cringe in "Blacula" or any of the other films that you watched for the book.
WHITEHEAD: I think any time they bring in, like, saving a community center from the white industrialist. I mean, there's a whole thing about - "Cleopatra Jones" is a famous blaxploitation movie with a high-kicking, kung fu secret agent who works for an unnamed government organization, and she moonlights taking down supervillains and then goes and works in the - and sort of pitches in at the local community center.
And there's this need to represent sort of Black consciousness and positive ideals and wedge them into this exploitation frame. You know, the idea of this kind of film is to get people into the seats, to give people a reason to cheer to seeing Black people beat up white people, and then there's also this kind of social impulse that they feel the need to insert, and it ends up being very, sort of, absurd and ridiculous in a way that, you know, I once found sort of amusing, but now it just sort of seems, you know, a bit sad. Let the exploitation be exploitation; let the politics live on their own in a separate sphere, but then trying to be everything for people who are just trying to forget their cares on a Saturday evening - it gets a bit too complicated.
GROSS: Part of the blaxploitation section of the film is set in Greenwich Village, and there's a Black comic performing at a club there who I think is modeled a little bit on Richard Pryor.
WHITEHEAD: Yeah. Richard Pryor was important to me growing up - you know, his sort of cultural commentary. And at this period, 1973, he's already sort of broken away from his square persona in the early '60s, doing this kind of straight Bill Cosby stuff, and has really - and has broken through and has come up with his, you know, fiery, bombastic persona, and he's about to break into the national consciousness. His concerts are starting to blow up, but he is doing exploitation movies, like "The Mack, " at this time, and we catch him at this moment where he's uncontrolled and has all this promise - but, you know, looking back from our contemporary perch, we see him flaming out literally, you know, six years later. So I wanted to put him in there. I wanted to sort of tackle Black genius. A lot of the figures in the book are corrupted - the crooked policeman, various politicians and then Richard Pryor. He has this moment of promise and possibility, and his own demons do him in, like so many other characters in the book.
GROSS: What did he mean to you when you were growing up?
WHITEHEAD: You know, a favorite activity in my house was watching HBO, whether it was George Carlin or Richard Pryor, and both of these guys would veer between the tragic and the absurd. You know, from minute to minute, their bits would rove over the human condition and, you know, turn between these different extremes. Definitely, in my book, I think there's a lot of terribleness on display about the human condition - and also, I think, a lot of humor and a lot of human absurdity, as well. So I'm trying to tackle with those extremes of the human experience in my work, and then people like Richard Pryor and George Carlin were the first people to articulate that for me when I was, like, 10 or 11 and watching their concert films with my parents.
GROSS: Well, let's take another short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Colson Whitehead. His new novel, "Crook Manifesto," is a sequel to his novel "Harlem Shuffle." "Harlem Shuffle" was set in Harlem in the '60s, and "Crook Manifesto" is set in Harlem in the '70s. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEME FROM SHAFT")
ISAAC HAYES: Who's the Black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing) Shaft.
HAYES: Damn right. (Singing) Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing) Shaft.
HAYES: Can you dig it? (Singing) Who's the cat that won't cop out...
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Colson Whitehead. His latest novel, "Crook Manifesto," is a crime novel set in Harlem in the years 1971 to '76. It's out in paperback this week.
The main character, Ray Carney, owns a furniture store that specializes in comfortable recliners and sofas. But he's also a fence, laundering and selling stolen goods like expensive jewelry, and he keeps getting pushed deeper into crime. He's part of the underworld that includes corrupt cops, Black revolutionaries, city politicians, and professional criminals. One of the characters in the novel takes a job as the security for a Blaxploitation film.
"Crook Manifesto" is the second in Whitehead's projected trilogy of Harlem novels. The first, "Harlem Shuffle," was set in the '60s. The third will be set in the '80s. Whitehead won back-to-back Pulitzers for his novels, "The Underground Railroad" and "The Nickel Boys."
Your novel ends in 1976, before hip-hop makes it onto the radio. So I'm assuming that hip-hop, rap, will make it into your third book in your trilogy, which will be set in the '80s?
WHITEHEAD: Yeah. I mean, I kept coming up with different capers and adventures for Carney. And so the first book, "Harlem Shuffle," became three different stories. This book's had three different stories. And now I'm working on figuring out how he fits into the '80s. Carney is a real square. So I almost see him hanging out with Afrika Bambaataa at the early...
GROSS: (Laughter).
WHITEHEAD: ...Bronx sound system extravaganzas.
GROSS: Yeah.
WHITEHEAD: But I did feel a connection, you know, writing this book during the pandemic. I was in New York, and the streets were empty that first year before we sort of opened up again. And I was writing about the time in New York history where the city was under siege - the 1970s. But at that time, you know, artists are making new forms of art, and that's hip-hop, that's punk, early bits of disco, New York salsa. And so I felt like part of this tradition of artists that work in the city. Things are terrible outside, but maybe we can make something new. And so hip-hop is on the horizon. I don't think Carney will be break dancing, but I'm sure maybe his son or daughter might attend something.
GROSS: Was that a motivation for you? That things are really terrible outside, but maybe you could make something new?
WHITEHEAD: I got a second wind of work because I couldn't go anywhere. And so usually I stopped work around 3 or 4. But during the pandemic, I had a second shift from 4 to 7. And it was just a very productive time. I was so enthralled with the work and Carney's story. So it kept me going. And I think we all found different ways to sustain ourselves during the early part of this pandemic. It was a way for me to make sense of my day, you know, with my family. We have food. What else can sustain me? And it was work.
GROSS: So let's talk furniture for a minute, since Ray Carney, your main character, owns a furniture store. What are some of the differences between the '60s furniture that he sells in "Harlem Shuffle" and the '70s furniture that he sells in "Crook Manifesto"? I think it's, like, kind of the cusp between the '60s and '70s when fiberglass chairs come in, those molded fiberglass chairs, that were often, like, orange (laughter).
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, if - when we go to Martin Green's apartment, the hipster jewel broker, he's definitely outfitted his place with cool hifi stereo and that kind of plastic furniture from Europe. Carney, you know, tries to sell it, but it's not really making a dent with his Harlem clientele. In "Harlem Shuffle," we get this kind of jet age, sleek lines in the couches, boomerang coffee tables. There's this idea of '60s optimism, New Camelot, that I think is embodied in a lot of the furniture. In the '70s, we got these more sort of boxy plush designs, a lot of earth colors. I'm sure we remember the brown, mustard, dark green couches. The carpeting gets different. We had the rise of the conversation pit in our living rooms or some people's living rooms.
GROSS: A conversation pit?
WHITEHEAD: Yes, it's like a little (laughter) a sunken living room and seating arranged where you're sort of on the floor. You might have a little fondue pot on the coffee table in the center. It was a thing, apparently (laughter). We didn't have it in our house. But the conversation pit was the thing.
GROSS: OK. So did you start collecting 70's furniture to write the book? Like, where did you go to see it? Or did you just look in books?
WHITEHEAD: Sometimes, you know, I try to get into character and sometimes I'm faking it. Definitely my affinity is with '50s and '60s midcentury modern furniture. I did not go out and populate my home with boxy, earth-tone furniture. But I love looking at the catalogs, and I hopefully recreated them faithfully in the book. You know, you see these people with white cable turtle necks, drinking hot chocolate on this very plush, fuzzy couch, seems very warm and inviting. And even if the streets in Harlem are going sort of crazy, you can come into Carney's Furniture and buy - assemble your cozy oasis.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Colson Whitehead. His new novel is called "Crook Manifesto." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ICE T SONG, "O.G. ORIGINAL GANGSTER")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Colson Whitehead. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his novels, "The Underground Railroad" and "The Nickel Boys." His new book, "Crook Manifesto," is a crime novel set in Harlem in the '70s. It's a sequel to his novel "Harlem Shuffle," which was set in the '60s. Their main character, Ray Carney, is a furniture store owner in Harlem, who also fences stolen jewels and more and keeps getting deeper into crime.
Since the Panthers and the Black Liberation Army figure into your novel, what was your introduction to them?
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, I mean, I think probably in a very cheesy way, like on bad TV shows, like "Good Times" or "The White Shadow," I think. You know, I was coming of age in the late '70s and consuming TV and movies. And that was, like, you know, plenty of time for the revolutionary fervor, Black national thought of the late '60s, early '70s to trickle into, you know, pop culture. So it's somebody on a sitcom, and their dashiki-clad uncle, who's very militant and walking into this very sort of bourgeoise household. So it's through pop culture. And obviously, the history of the Black Panther Party was not being taught in my high school, I think - I assume most high schools. And now it's, you know, I think, illegal to teach Black history in certain states and cities. So it wasn't until college, I - you know, got sort of more grounding on some of the real arguments and what different aspects of the civil rights movement actually meant and what they did.
GROSS: Was your family involved in any aspect of the civil rights or post-civil rights era?
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, I love, you know, hearing the story about my mom and dad going to the March on Washington. They weren't activists. They were people trying to raise a family in an incredibly racist country and finding their own way of changing things, changing the status quo, which was, you know, I think, family and their business.
GROSS: So growing up, seeing the Panthers as described in sitcoms or "The White Shadow," did you not take them seriously or did they seem foolish because of their portrayal on sitcoms? Was that your first impression?
WHITEHEAD: Well, no, I think there's this - you know, they were holy. The rift that I described in "Harlem Shuffle" between people who were more revolutionary-oriented versus reformist was not part of, you know, the sort of pop cultural depictions. But in the way that my parents would talk about that time, my friends' parents, it was very serious. It was deadly serious. No matter what you thought they ended up achieving or what their legacy was in 1982, 1984, 1985, they were, you know, these holy warriors.
GROSS: You've said in an interview that you retreated into pop culture in part to escape your father's alcohol-fueled rages. Can you talk about that a little bit? Is that too personal?
WHITEHEAD: It is a bit personal. But I think being able to close my door and retreat into these imaginary worlds, whether I was 7 years old or 8 years old, and think about what the war against the Empire would be like, you know, if I was in it or "Star Trek" or Spider-Man or even trying to outrun zombies in "Night Of The Living Dead." You know, I think the imaginary worlds of all these different writers I adored provided escape, you know, the same way that, you know, people have always, you know, found release and escape, and nurturing in storytelling and fantasy.
GROSS: One of your novels, "Sag Harbor," is inspired by the summers you spent in Sag Harbor. Can you describe Sag Harbor and its significance in your life?
WHITEHEAD: Sag Harbor is a town on the east end of Long Island, sort of better known as the Hamptons. And there's a town in that Hamptons constellation called Sag Harbor. It was an old whaling town, and there's a long-standing Black and Native American neighborhood, about three-quarters of a mile outside town. And Black folks from New Jersey and New York started vacationing there in the '30s and '40s. And the little community sprouted up by word of mouth. And my family started going there in the '40s. I spent all my summers there until I went to college. And it was this neat little community, nestled in this improbable place, and there are other places like it, and you know, I hear people talk about how it reminded them of their childhood in Michigan, another sort of Black town, Black beach community, or in Baltimore. And I wanted to - I had to sort of shake up my writing career. I had to find a new way of telling stories.
And so I picked this really autobiographical story to tell about growing up in the 1980s and, you know, changed how I approached characters and writing. And so it's not only a place that sort of formed my identity in many different ways, but also, you know, who I am as a writer in the last 15 years.
GROSS: In the novel, the main character has a brother who's - I don't know, like, 10 months apart in age, something like that. And so it's as if they were twins when they're very young and they go their separate ways. Did you have a sibling who is that close in age to you?
WHITEHEAD: Yeah. My brother, who passed away a couple of years ago.
GROSS: I'm sorry to hear that.
WHITEHEAD: We were 10 months apart, and everyone thought that we were twins because we were a little unit, sort of inseparable. And part of the book is capturing the beauty of that twinhood. And then also the separation that happened when we became teenagers, and we had to sort of, you know, find our different paths in high school and in the world. So I'm writing about that time, but also at a time in my life, that was, you know, very, very formative.
GROSS: Did you like having somebody, like having a brother who was so close in age to you that people thought you were twins?
WHITEHEAD: You know, now, you know, sort of - we broke up in high school. But it was, you know, it was a very, very special thing. You know, we did everything together, whether it was reading Fangoria Magazine and reading out part of John Carpenter's interview about "Escape From New York" and "The Fog" or in "Halloween," his movie "Halloween," or renting David Cronenberg movies by the armful from Crazy Eddie's, which was an electronic store in New York City. So yes, I mean, it was, you know, I hope I got - I did some justice in getting him into the book and telling our story.
GROSS: Was your break up acrimonious?
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, I mean, it was just - you know, in high school, I think the burden of being a semi-respectable teenager was a bit much for us. You know, I think we each had to find our own different way of being out in the world. So no, you know, we were close, but never as close as we were before the high-stakes game of puberty started.
GROSS: Did your brother's death make you think about your own mortality?
WHITEHEAD: My brother, you know, was in sort of bad health for many years, and definitely in "The Nickel Boys" and "Harlem Shuffle," I was trying to figure out that relationship. Both of those novels have, you know, Black men who are very close and go in different directions - one person makes it out; one person does not make it out. One person finds their way in the world, and one - and the other doesn't. And so even though those books don't necessarily seem to have a very, sort of, autobiographical element, in those two core relationships, you know, I was definitely trying to figure out me, figure out my brother, and how we ended up splitting apart after being twins.
GROSS: So while we've been talking about the '70s, has your head really been in the '80s, 'cause you're working on that new novel now?
WHITEHEAD: I'm trying to figure out what of the '80s will work for Carney and his gang. So New York has come out of the fiscal crisis, Wall Street's booming again and we're getting that, you know, boom-and-bust action in terms of the city's fortune and Carney's fortune. They're mirroring each other, so what do I use from the glitzy '80s? You know, Donald Trump, no; you know, I'm not going to befoul my book with Donald Trump, so...
GROSS: He's not going to read it. If he's not in it, you know, he's not going to read it.
WHITEHEAD: (Laughter) Yes.
GROSS: You've just lost one reader.
WHITEHEAD: (Laughter) So yeah, so is New York in 1981 fruitful territory; 1984; 1986-87? New York does, you know, find its footing financially, and then in the late '80s, the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic is sort of waiting to spoil the party again, and that's - you know, that's definitely the city I know. It's going through a bad period, being laid low and then trying to figure out how to come back from it, so I'm trying to figure out what moments in '80s New York will serve the story and also are interesting to me. I, you know, sort of found my identity in alternative music - college radio, as we used to call it. Carney is probably not hanging out at CBGB - he's probably not doing the things I used to do, so I have to figure out what a 50-something Carney is going to seek out and interact with.
GROSS: Just one more thing. I know that you've said that when you walk around outside, you often have, like, an expressionless face or you look sad, 'cause you're thinking, and I think people ask you, like, what's wrong?
WHITEHEAD: Sure, yeah (laughter).
GROSS: That always used to happen to me when I was growing up.
WHITEHEAD: Oh.
GROSS: Like, people would come up to me and say, oh, honey, what's wrong? Are you lost? What's your reaction when people do that to you? Do they still?
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, and I just say, you know, I was thinking about death, or something.
GROSS: (Laughter) Oh, I wish I'd thought of that.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: I'll remember that the next time if somebody does that to me.
WHITEHEAD: Yeah, there you go.
GROSS: (Laughter) Colson, thank you so much.
WHITEHEAD: Sure. (Laughter) Take care. Thanks a lot.
GROSS: Colson Whitehead's latest novel, "Crook Manifesto," has just been published in paperback. We spoke last summer, when it was first published. After we take a short break, rock critic Ken Tucker will review "Blackgrass," the new recording by Jerry Williams - the R&B soul and funk artist who performs under the name Swamp Dogg. "Blackgrass" is a country album - Ken says it's one of the best country albums of the year. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUDU PUKWANA & SPEAR'S "CHURCH MOUSE")
Colson Whitehead Knows the Secret to Reinvention
In Crook Manifesto, the author transforms himself once again. Here, he tells Esquire about the challenges of trilogies, the "rules" of crime fiction, and Ray Carney's future.
By Adrienne WestenfeldPublished: Jul 18, 2023
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“It was a glorious June morning,” Colson Whitehead writes in Crook Manifesto. “The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.”
Welcome back to the Technicolor world of Ray Carney: furniture salesman, family man, and sometimes-criminal. Last seen in Harlem Shuffle, Carney returns for another bruising round of moral misadventures in Crook Manifesto, the second installment in Whitehead’s planned three-volume series. Crook Manifesto finds Carney upwardly mobile and back on the straight and narrow, but all it takes to pull him back into Harlem’s criminal underbelly is one tortured trade: to score his daughter tickets to The Jackson 5’s sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, he dips back into the jewel fencing game one last time. But of course, there’s no “one last time” for men like Carney, who reflects, “Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival.” Soon enough, Carney becomes an unwilling accomplice to a corrupt detective on a long, dark night of the soul, pressed into service as a henchman throughout a nightmarish carousel of shoot-outs and stick-ups. The consequences of that brutal night ricochet across Carney’s life, dragging him ever further down into the morass of danger, dirty deals, and double lives he’s fought so hard to escape.
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Like Harlem Shuffle before it, Crook Manifesto is divided into three novellas, this time set in 1971, 1973, and 1976. In the bravura central novella, “Nefertiti T.N.T.,” Carney cedes the stage to Pepper, an old-time crook hired to track down Lucinda Cole, the missing leading lady of a Blaxploitation movie filming in Harlem. In the third novella, “The Finishers,” set in a New York City gripped by Bicentennial mania, Carney and Pepper investigate a wave of deadly fires across Harlem, only to discover a shocking web of arson, insurance fraud, and real estate corruption. “In this series, I feel like I’m drawing on a lot of different themes from my career,” Whitehead tells Esquire. “It's about New York, it's about systems, it’s about corruption and racism and the failure of institutions. All of those things I've been working on in different ways in different books, I get to use in Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto.”
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Whitehead Zoomed with Esquire to discuss the challenges of trilogies, the "rules" of crime fiction, and the future of Ray Carney. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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ESQUIRE: You could have set the second Ray Carney novel at any point in New York history. What about the 1970s was so captivating to you?
COLSON WHITEHEAD: I always start off with very simple propositions—then I make them real and they become purposeful. In this case, I knew that I had followed Carney in 1959, 1961, and 1964, so following him through the 1970s and then the 1980s made sense. I had to pick and choose which moments in the seventies to spotlight—in 1971, I was interested in the police corruption happening in the city and the Knapp Commission, and in 1976, the bicentennial fervor was a good opportunity to talk about patriotism in America. I made each different year work for me in different ways.
When we spoke about Harlem Shuffle, you described the depth of your research, saying that you read memoirs by gangsters and fell down YouTube rabbit holes. What did your research process look like for Crook Manifesto?
This time, I wasn’t reading crime novels or memoirs. I had that down. But I was digging up the Knapp Commission’s findings about police corruption. I was rewatching Blaxploitation movies, too—when I was younger and writing pop culture criticism, I wrote a lot about them. I came back to that genre 30 years later and saw what held up—not much—but of course, I had fun with the genre through Zippo and his movie shoot. In 1976, we reach the infrastructure story and general City Hall corruption. I was reading up about the arson epidemic, reading about insurance fraud, finding different periods of fire epidemics. In the book, there’s the brief flashback to the Jewish firebug in the 19-teens—he was a real person. I learned a lot about the secret history of Jewish Harlem, which doesn't exist anymore. I also discovered the links between insurance fraud in the early part of the century and later in the 1970s. I learned a lot about the city, and when I make it work, it serves Carney's story.
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When it comes to trilogies, middle volumes are always tricky. What were the pleasures and the challenges of tackling the middle book?
I handed in Harlem Shuffle to my editor and then started writing Crook Manifesto the next day. I worked for a week and then stopped, because it seemed crazy to dive right in, but I was ready to go. I knew all the characters; I had everybody's personality down. I was taking notes for the second book while writing the first one. I had the whole world, so it was more about figuring out new ways to test Carney, and not repeating the same kind of heists and robberies. The challenge in the second book was to find new variations on his story. Now that I’m working on the third book, it’s the same thing. How can I keep it fresh? As a child of the seventies, I have the Star Wars model in my head—The Empire Strikes Back is generally considered better than Return of the Jedi. So I want to keep the third book as good as Empire—as good as Crook Manifesto. It becomes a challenge to keep it fresh, but the challenge is also the fun of it.
In both of these books, your delight in the crime genre is evident—but these are also dark comedies and social novels. How do you balance the need to deliver a crime novel with the desire to color outside the lines?
I love sci-fi apocalypses and zombie stories—so my zombie book, Zone One, takes off in that genre, but it's my own thing with my own preoccupations. It's about the apocalypse, but it's also about overcoming trauma. I injected my own philosophies and interests into it. In this series, I feel like I’m drawing on a lot of different themes from my career. It's about New York, it's about systems, it’s about corruption and racism and the failure of institutions. All of those things I've been working on in different ways in different books, I get to use in Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto. I'm not a crime novelist; I'm a writer, and I'm writing these crime novels, and I'm trying to figure out what I like from this genre and want to keep, or what I dislike and want to throw out. There are no real rules. I'm not going to get kicked out of the Crime Writers Union. I'm not going to get rid of kicked out of the Historical Writers Union for having a fantasy element in The Underground Railroad. The main thing is to pull it off so that people don't say, “He’s a crappy crime novelist and a crappy historical novelist.”
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What do you dislike about crime novels that you've kicked out?
In Harlem Shuffle, there’s a very detailed heist in the Harlem Hotel. In Crook Manifesto, I asked myself: do I have to have another detailed heist? Or can it be Carney’s dark night of the soul with Munson? Obviously there's a body count—we're dealing with criminals, so it's a crime novel—but it's really about these two men on one night and how they play off each other. Having done a heist, I don't have to do that again. Having had a revenge scheme in Harlem Shuffle, I don't have to do that again. I don't feel beholden to any genre rules as long as it makes sense in Carney's world.
Now that you mentioned it, I was so taken with the mini-heists in this book. The fried chicken heist is what, four pages?
It doesn’t always have to be a 20-page set piece. It can be a short character piece with Pepper. With that in mind, there’s room for the game console heist and the fried chicken heist. Those can be about character, not so much about delivering a minute-by-minute story about opening the safe.
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Speaking of character pieces with Pepper, I’m reminded of the moment when, upon entering a mob boss’s house, he refuses to take off his shoes. That's such a terrific character moment, and such a memorable blend of violence and humor.
That’s part of my worldview, and in my books, I'm always veering between the tragic and the comic. Not so much in The Underground Railroad because there wasn't room for humor in that book, but in a lot of my other books, I’m bouncing between two extremes. 100 years into the crime genre—after Dashiell Hammett and Chester Himes and Donald Westlake and Walter Mosley and Quentin Tarantino—there’s so much ironic play built into the genre at this point. Even in a serious crime drama, like The Sopranos, there’s a lot of humor. Terrible things are going on, but we’re aware that we're playing with these stories that have been around for a couple of generations now.
We need the humor, or else we’ll have to get off the carousel of relentless violence.
That’s what I like about Pepper and Carney. In terms of being a human being, Pepper is a fish out of water, so his interactions with normal people are amusing. Then Carney is out of his element when he’s with these criminal types, whether they're corrupt cops or arsonists or gangsters. There’s a lot of humor in these fish out of water scenarios.
In the middle section of the book, Carney moves out of the foreground and becomes a side character in Pepper’s story. What about that structure of sidelining your protagonist was appealing to you?
Pepper provides a different way of looking at the world. We're seeing normal people through this sociopath's eyes, and that's an interesting point of view. We get to see Carney as a family man in a different way—Pepper is repulsed by a normal family unit, but he also finds it attractive, and he’s brought into the Carney family fold as an uncle. Carney is an established character and can have his adventures, but there’s also room for this other perspective on crime in the city that Pepper can provide.
In that middle section, we also spend time with Zippo as he makes Blaxploitation movies. What was it like for you to revisit that genre?
I had a real affection for those movies, but going back to them, they don’t hold up. They're really not that adept, although they’re fun, and they provided a release for a 1970s audience that didn't have a lot of Black protagonists. You're seeing Black faces on the screen beating up white cops and racists and winning sometimes. I was interested in Blaxploitation as a foil for Pepper, and also for pure humor—it becomes Zippo’s pretentious way of dealing with his art.
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In Zippo’s story, we encounter two people, Lucinda Cole and Roscoe Pope, who are contending with what it means to be a Black entertainer at that moment in culture, and how their race constricts their choices. Was that something you researched?
If you look at a Blaxploitation movie, you inevitably wonder, What happened to so-and-so? The history of Black Hollywood is in those movies. Someone might have been a leading man in Shaft or Superfly, but that's all they did because there were no other opportunities in Hollywood. So that's part of the reality of being a Black entertainer in the seventies. If you look at someone like Roscoe Pope, someone very talented but also very damaged, obviously patterned after Richard Pryor—Richard Pryor started in low-budget movies and in the mid-seventies broke out with his concert movies. He was doing edgy stuff in the mid-seventies, then by 1981 he was coked out and doing questionable movies for a paycheck. As in Lucinda Cole’s cases, you don’t get the same opportunities as white actors, or you burn out because there's no model for how to be a Black entertainer in Hollywood. The industry really does chew you up and spit you out the same way the city does, the same way the crime business does. Hollywood and the gangster scene in Harlem are two different things, but they’re both powerful forces that can destroy you.
In both books, you linger on this idea of “churn”; in Harlem Shuffle, you write, “There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people's lives from here to there, a churn of property.” That idea returns in Crook Manifesto, especially as it relates to urban renewal. How did your thinking about that concept kind of evolve in this second book?
It’s how I see the city, and I'm trying to elaborate on the concept from book to book. That's why I opened Harlem Shuffle at the site of the future World Trade Center. It's a bustling Radio Row section, then at the end of the book, it becomes a crater where the World Trade Center will be. Of course, as a contemporary reader, we know that it'll have these other iterations. It will rise again after the terrorist attacks. So I'm following Carney over three decades, and he's going up and down following the city over those three decades. We know that the downward spiral of the seventies is definitely happening in this book, but in the eighties, the city pulled out of it—Wall Street was booming again, and the city became wealthy. At the end of the eighties, we got to the crack epidemic and the failure of city services. The city is going up and down again. For me, that's my experience as a New Yorker and as a person. I've had ups and downs in my life and my career. Narrating that for Carney is really important—and the city's ups and downs are also part of that churn.
And yet we lose sight of this. As you write, “The city was being tested. It was always being tested and emerging on the other side in a newer, stronger version for having been laid low, but everyone forgot this from time to time and so they were quite distressed by the latest manifestation.”
When I was writing the second book, it was during the pandemic when we were locked down. I was doing research walking around Harlem with my mask on. Everything was closed and I was writing about the seventies, a time when the city was also in a terrible state, but at the same time, it was the birth of punk and disco and hip hop. Artists were working during this time when the city was in great decline. If you step back, New York always comes back. It’s a terrorist attack, it’s a recession, it's a pandemic, it's a drug epidemic, but the city is always coming back. As a New Yorker, that’s important for me. And as a writer, I can use that.
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If you step back, New York always comes back.
What can you share about Book Three?
Just that it's the eighties and some of the people are coming back. Carney is about 30 in the first book, in his forties in the second book, and in the next one, he'll be in his fifties. Where does that place him in his life’s journey? His kids are tiny in the first book, then they're in high school and college, and then they're gone. Elizabeth is on her own journey with her job in the second book and also in the third book. It’s thirty years of a life and trying to narrate how he sees himself in the world.
Is it strange to be working on that book and talking about this book?
Yes, and it’s also coming out in foreign editions. I'm talking about Harlem Shuffle, starting to talk about Crook Manifesto, and writing the third book. But it's all one story. If I step back, it's one 1100-page story about Ray Carney.
How has writing this series changed you as a New Yorker?
I feel energized to tell my version of New York, and to be in New York making my art like so many other people. Like The Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and Afrika Bambaataa. The city was crumbling in 1975, but somehow they found creative energy out of it and made it into something new. I definitely felt like I was doing that with Crook Manifesto—writing about a time when the city was in peril, during a time when the city was in peril, and then being saved by the work. It also forced me to step back and see these different movements in the city. Harlem is being gentrified, but some of those people are the great-great grandchildren of the Italian, Jewish, and German immigrants who were the first inhabitants of Harlem, who became middle class and moved to the suburbs. Now the cycle continues. And for me, that's really exciting. Gentrification sucks, but it’s also just the life of the city.
It's the churn.
It's the churn.
Whitehead, Colson CROOK MANIFESTO Doubleday (Fiction None) $30.00 7, 18 ISBN: 9780385545150
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his boisterous, incisive saga of late-20th-century Harlem and of a furniture dealer barely keeping his criminal side at bay.
The adventures of entrepreneur, family man, and sometime fence Ray Carney, which began with Harlem Shuffle (2021), are carried from the Black Citadel's harried-but-hopeful 1960s of that book to the dismal-and-divided '70s shown here. In the first of three parts, it's 1971, and Carney's business is growing even amid the city's Nixon-era doldrums and the rise of warring militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Carney barely thinks about sliding back into his more illicit vocation until his teenage daughter, May, starts hankering to see the Jackson 5 perform at Madison Square Garden. And so he decides to look up an old contact named Munson, a seriously bent White NYPD officer and "accomplished fixer," who agrees to get free "up close" seats for the concert if Carney will fence stolen jewelry stuffed in a paper bag. But the job carries far more physical peril than advertised, culminating in a long night's journey into day with Carney getting beaten, robbed, and strong-armed into becoming Munson's reluctant, mostly passive partner in the cop's wanton rampage throughout the city. In the second part, it's 1973, and Pepper, Carney's strong, silent confidant and all-purpose tough guy, is recruited to work security on the set of a blaxploitation epic whose female lead inexplicably goes missing. The third and final part takes place in the bicentennial year of 1976, the nadir of the city's fiscal crisis, marked by widespread fires in vacant buildings in Harlem and elsewhere in New York's poorer neighborhoods. When an 11-year-old boy is seriously injured by a seemingly random firebombing, Carney is moved to ask himself, "What kind of man torches a building with people inside?" He resolves to find out with Pepper's help. What recurs in each of these episodes are vivid depictions of hustlers of varied races and social strata, whether old-hand thieves, crass showbiz types, remorseless killers, or slick politicians on the make with the business elite. Whitehead's gift for sudden, often grotesque eruptions of violence is omnipresent, so much so that you almost feel squeamish to recognize this book for the accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners it is. If its spirits aren't quite as buoyant as those of Harlem Shuffle, it's because the era it chronicles was depressed in more ways than one. Assuming Whitehead continues chronicling Ray Carney's life and times, things should perk up, or amp up, for the 1980s.
It's not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.
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"Whitehead, Colson: CROOK MANIFESTO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747342408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0a868b22. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
* Crook Manifesto. By Colson Whitehead. July 2023.336p. Doubleday, $30 (9780385545150); e-book (9780385545167).
Harlem furniture-store owner, family man, and sometimes crook Ray Carney had been keeping it clean. But in 1971, when his daughter begs for tickets to see the Jackson Five, Carney contacts a dirty cop and gets dragged back into the violent underworld. Whitehead continues the ensnaring, ingenious, mordantly funny, and profoundly revelatory crime saga begun in Harlem Shuffle (2021), digging even deeper into the city's corruption, from gang wars to a battle between rival fried-chicken restaurants to alliances among politicians, insurance companies, fixers, and arsonists in the grand racket known as urban renewal. Carney's archly cynical narration alternates with the blunt yet philosophical musings of his cohort Pepper, who tries to abide by his "crook manifesto." Then there's Zippo, shooting scenes for his Blaxploitation flick, Code Name: Nefertiti, at Carney's store and stirring up more trouble. Directing a spectacularly vivid cast that includes motley criminals and Carney's rock-steady wife and sweet kids and nephew, Whitehead tracks various strategies for survival in a city engulfed in fiery chaos. Culminating in 1976, this saturated tale is laced with caustic commentary on everything from the paradoxes Black artists face to the ludicrous commercialization of the Bicentennial. Whitehead captures the menace and the beauty of the city in exhilarating detail within the many-faceted, rollicking plot that propels his second, magnificently vibrant and transcendent Ray Carney novel. --Donna Seaman
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will hunt for any new book by Whitehead, but the latest in his Harlem saga will be sought with particular zeal.
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Seaman, Donna. "Crook Manifesto." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 17, 1 May 2023, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A748959196/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96850de0. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Crook Manifesto
Colson Whitehead. Doubleday, $30 (336p) ISBN 978-0-385-54515-0
Whitehead returns with a colorful it haphazard sequel to Harlem Shuffle involving an interconnected series of misguided capers. In 1971, Harlem furniture dealer Art Carney hits up corrupt cop and fixer Detective Munson for Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter. Munson, in possession of some stolen diamonds, reels Carney back into the fence work he'd recently retired from in exchange for the tickets. The night takes a turn for the worse when Munson forces Carney at gunpoint to help with more dangerous errands, including a stickup of a neighborhood gangster's poker game. The next and strongest section focuses on Pepper, Carney's occasional associate in crime, who is moonlighting as hired muscle on a Blaxploitation film production. When actor Lucinda Cole goes missing, Pepper visits her drug dealer, a dangerous gangster, and others, spilling a fair amount of blood on Luanda's behalf. In the final act, Carney hires Pepper to find out who's setting tenement fires at the same time as redevelopment schemes transform Harlem. Unfortunately, the momentum is throttled by copious references to events in the previous book, while an explosive climax feels rushed. Still, almost every page has at least one great line ("A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not"). Though there's fun to be had, it's not Whitehead's best. (July)
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"Crook Manifesto." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 22, 29 May 2023, p. 92. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A753088879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b2ad01f. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
CROOK MANIFESTO, by Colson Whitehead
Returning to the world of his novel ''Harlem Shuffle,'' Colson Whitehead's ''Crook Manifesto'' is a dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There's an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead's previous books, genre isn't the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. He has it right: the music, the energy, the painful calculus of loss. Structured into three time periods -- 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America's bicentennial celebration, 1976 -- ''Crook Manifesto'' gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.
This is a story of survival without redemption, where the next generation loses some of the well-honed instincts that have built this world. Whitehead's hero, the furniture salesman and opportunistic small-time criminal Ray Carney, is older than he was when we last met. He has retreated from his practice of working in the ''secondary economy.'' But outside his successful furniture business's showroom window, Harlem is stirring with the unease of change and oppression.
The presence of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army has set a new edge to the age-old battle between the neighborhood and the white policemen riding roughshod down its streets. From behind his store's plate-glass window Carney takes it all in: the thump of car engines, the shouts and taunts, the stand-downs of Black men being pushed against walls and searched by white police officers, the news headlines of police officers killed. Sirens cut through conversations; people traverse the powerful river of the sounds and smells that are Harlem.
Carney wants to stay out of trouble, but his daughter, who feels lost to him through teenage angst, wants tickets to see the Jackson 5, a show sold out long ago. Whitehead uses that bittersweet pull of parental loss to plunge into a comedic -- and deadly -- journey. From here Carney revisits and rekindles connections he once had and paid dearly to leave behind. He blunders through criminals' apartments, carries hot jewels in his briefcase and is forced to rob a poker game.
Carney is resigned and observant, a participant and a hostage, as he embarks on a nightmarish shotgun ride across New York City. His navigator and terrorizer on the journey is a corrupt white cop who won't stop talking about ringolevio, the street game that Carney and his friends used to play in Harlem and the cop played in his own childhood neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen. The more the cop talks, the more Carney tries to figure a way out, an exit. He becomes an unwilling confessor and witness to an old truth: No one escapes. It sets up a cascading series of tragedies, through ''Don Quixote''-like adventures, to set the scales right, to create a new kind of version of who he is, what Harlem is.
Whitehead bends language. He makes sinuous the sounds of a city and its denizens pushing against the boundaries. He can be mordantly funny, with old-time enforcers observing the precision of past brutalities while the language in Carney's head is all about the ad he needs to draft -- despite the growing number of bodies and corruptions he faces -- for the July 4 bicentennial, and what that holiday really signifies in his Harlem and for his customers in search of their next sofa. At other times, Whitehead gives his characters the quiet and room to issue forth the sound of such deep regret and resignation: of being trapped, of all the odds stacked against them, even from within.
''It was like he was a kid again, just starting to understand the shape of his sadness,'' one character thinks as he dutifully hunts for the turpentine he will use to start an illicit fire. ''Out of step even then, lost among the tall buildings.''
Whitehead's men struggle with connections, they carry their heartaches and lost loves close to the chest. They have names, and nicknames gained from what can only be called traumatic past experiences: Zippo, Corky. They value loyalty and yet have little trust. They divide the streets, the illegal businesses, dubious accounting and the skill sets (arson, safecracking, protection), and then the power shifts when the players disperse and change sides. Caught up in their specialties, they run the rackets like the corrupt corporations that run America.
Enter the artist and the unaffiliated arsonist, ''wild-eyed men'' from Whitehead's ''misfit census'' who share a passion for something ineffable: conjuring something wholly new. For one it is a fabulist movie in a dark theater -- a blaxploitation film shot in Harlem, ''Nefertiti T.N.T.,'' starring an actress from a New Jersey suburb with a bio that says otherwise. For the secular arsonist, it is the rush of the sound of fire catching the drapes, the saved-for couch or the empty raw bones of an abandoned building. We all have our dreams.
But for Carney, the fires become an inflection point he doesn't understand, a push to action that seems, even to him, out of character:
''He was here tonight because a boy he didn't know was caught in a fire, and a spark had caught Carney's sleeve. To avenge -- who? The boy? To punish bad men? Which ones -- there were too many to count. The city was burning. It was burning not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it. Every night you heard the sirens. Pierce blamed years of misguided policy, but Carney rejected that narrow diagnosis: From what he understood about human beings, today's messes and cruelties were the latest version of the old ones. Same flaws, different face. All of it passed down.''
A single act that defies all of his well-honed instincts and street training reveals Harlem to Carney in all the ways he has come to know it in its parts -- the training from his father, his in-laws' ambitions, his inability to plant his feet firmly in this place he has called home. When the novel comes to its end there is a grace note for Carney, maybe not that island retreat his dreaded white cop fixer had in mind, but a different kind of peace we can all aspire to: to survive our own decisions and dreams, to be loved, to belong to a place we love.
Walter Mosley's most recent novel is ''Every Man a King.''
CROOK MANIFESTO | By Colson Whitehead | 319 pp. | Doubleday | $29
Walter Mosley's most recent novel is ''Every Man a King.''
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Mosley, Walter. "Simple as Do, Re, Mi." The New York Times Book Review, 23 July 2023, p. 9(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758126973/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a5b69150. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
The Ray Carney saga is Colson Whitehead's first series, and just like his readers, he feels passionately about the man at its center: a respectable, upwardly mobile furniture salesman by day, and fence of stolen goods by night. "I love him too. He's been a great source of pleasure and inspiration," says the author. But that affection doesn't stop Whitehead from mercilessly putting Ray through the wringer.
Picking up four years after the close of Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto heightens the dangers and stakes for the prosperous Harlem merchant and former hustler, and Ray soon gets sucked back into life on the seamier side. After all, as Whitehead writes, "crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight."
In truth, the author may love Ray now, but the character was born out of a kind of hate--the distaste Whitehead felt for a ubiquitous trope in heist movies. "The character of the fence is always a travesty," he says. "The team does all the work, and half the crew's dead--they're crawling or bloody, the cops are after them. And then some random guy you haven't even seen before in the whole movie is like '10 cents on the dollar.'"
Whitehead was incensed by the patterns he observed on-screen, but that ire gave way to curiosity: "I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?" And from this interrogation came the driving force of the Ray Carney trilogy: "the psychology of the fence....Having a front business and havingyour illegal stuff in the back provided the divided nature of Ray Carney."
Although Whitehead kept his cards close to the vest, he knew almost from the start that he had a series on his hands. While the initial instinct was "to do a heist book and just have fun with that genre," once started, the ideas kept flowing. There was just too much material, and he was having too much fun to stop at one book. "I was halfway through [Harlem Shuffle], and I was coming up with more capers that obviously would not fit," he says.
Doing the math, he figured: six adventures, two books. But also, "if you do two, might as well do three. You know, I'm definitely a rule-of-three guy." Still, he proceeded cautiously in terms of commitment. He didn't want to be held to a third book, just in case he got bored--but that never happened. Now he's deep in the writing of Ray's third and presumably final set of adventures.
Along with the series being a trilogy, each individual book has a threeact structure. Harlem Shuffle tells of three separate misadventures for Ray at three pivotal moments during the 1960s, and this structure continues in Crook Manifesto, which evokes the '70s down to the sight, feel and smell of a crumbling New York City. In the first book, Ray is in his 30s; second book, 40s; third book, 50s. Ray's experiences with aging and all its attendant challenges are essential to the series, and it also means that initially, "his kids are babies; in the second book, they're teenagers of varying degrees of annoyingness; and in the third book, they'll be in college and out of the house."
Three decades is, as Whitehead says, "a long stretch of time." But in addition to the capers and misadventures that flow from the heist narrative, he found something compelling about the mystery surrounding the fence, and with great finesse he explores the dichotomy between Ray's straight-and-narrow life and "the call of the street." We witness Ray's wrestling with his criminal nature--"bending toward it, embracing it, rejecting it," Whitehead says--and by shifting our focus to this internal tug of war, we are invited to think beyond the usual markers of time and success.
In the four-year interregnum between Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Ray has kept his nose clean, built a prosperous business and bought both a commercial building for his store and a home for his family, moving uptown to the much storied if fraying Strivers' Row. It's a laudable, remarkable rise for the son of a failed career criminal, and yet it's not enough.
In 1971, the year Crook Manifesto kicks off, Ray's sabbatical from crime ends abruptly in an almost ironic way, considering the innocence of the inciting incident in comparison to the refuse he must wade through after. Ray calls on an old contact to get tickets to a sold-out (and history-making) Jackson 5 concert for his 15-year-old daughter--although as Whitehead points out, this fatherly duty is a cover to give in to an itch that's been nagging at him for years.
The world around Ray is also evolving. In Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead allowed the pull of crucial--though not necessarily widely remembered--events in New York City history to guide him in shaping Ray's story. In pursuit of key moments to "exploit," he arrived upon the anti-police Harlem riots in 1943 and 1964. Whitehead decided that Invisible Man had portrayed the former in such an iconic, indelible manner that "I'll let Ralph [Ellison] keep the 1940s one. I haven't read a lot of stuff about the 1960s one. So it was open territory."
The tension between the public and the police escalates to a palpable and deadly fever pitch in Crook Manifesto. The New York Police Department wages war against Black power activists, and a police corruption scandal widens, putting cops in the hot seat. And yet, in a way that matches the dualism of the novel's leading man, Ray's story also shows how normal life goes on alongside such events.
In keeping with that, the movie-and music-obsessed author takes the opportunity to throw his love of pop culture history into the mix, something that gives him great pleasure. "I was very taken with that idea that I could get my pop culture fixation and bring Ray along," he says. So in addition to the lackson 5 concert, which provides a soundtrack and momentum for Crook Manifesto's first movement, the second section weaves in the rise of Blaxploitation cinema. It's a heady and riveting mashup of politics, culture, family life and crime that only a talent of Whitehead's stature could so seamlessly blend.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 BookPage
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Bell, Carole V. "THE WHITEHEAD MANIFESTO: As his celebrated Ray Carney series steps into the 1970s, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead continues to explore history through propulsive heist narratives that go far beyond crimes and cover-ups." BookPage, Aug. 2023, pp. 14+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A756843909/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5fd80018. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.
Colson Whitehead was born in New York in 1969 and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author. His books include The Underground Railroad, which was adapted for TV by Barry Jenkins.
What's your earliest memory?
I'm not sure, but it is probably depressing, a template for miseries to come.
Who are your heroes?
As a child, Han Solo, who'd do anything for a pay cheque. Now, Harrison Ford, who ... chooses his roles solely on artistic merit.
What book last changed your thinking?
How about the first book? The Catcher in the Rye. I was 11 or 12 years old. Before I read it, I assumed if something was famous or popular, it was good.
Which political figure do you look up to?
I don't. In my country, we throw up statues of any old dimwit, some racist politician of yore or treasonous Confederate general. Tear 'em down! If you need to put up a statue of a white person, pick a deserving one. Kurt Cobain. Meryl Streep. The dude who invented microwave popcorn.
What would be your "Mastermind" specialist subject?
My shtick is tender baby-back ribs that have been in the smoker for a couple of hours, and exploring what it means to be human in a soulless, postmodern age. What do I win?
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
This is a white people question. "Oh, to have been at the Globe for the first performance of Hamlet!" I need modern technology, penicillin at the f***ing minimum, and also for things to be appreciatively less racist than they have been for most of human history. So: a fancy hotel in Vietnam--always wanted to go!--and last week.
What TV show could you not live without?
I owe my sense of irony and understanding of human weakness to a childhood diet of Twilight Zone reruns.
Who would paint your portrait?
Mark Rothko.
What's your theme tune?
"Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-Lot. It's about a man with a fondness for big butts. The heart wants what it wants.
What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?
As Sir Mix-a-Lot offered in his seminal work, "Has your girlfriend got the butt? Tell 'em to shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt." I did so, and was told in no uncertain terms that they didn't appreciate being objectified.
What's currently bugging you?
This whole thing we got going on, as a species.
What single thing would make your life better?
A cure for cancer. What kind of person would say, "Bring back the short-lived 1977 Richard Benjamin sitcom Quark, about interstellar garbage haulers?" An insane person who doesn't understand the importance of a well-crafted Public Persona, that's who. Never mind that seven episodes was clearly insufficient and NBC should have given the show more of a chance to find its audience.
When were you happiest?
The last day of that magical summer, you remember--the light just so, sea birds wheeling in their ancient grace, the surf pounding in an expression of eternal joy.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
Deep down, I'm just a song and dance man.
Are we all doomed?
I think things are looking up. (Winks.)
"Crook Manifesto" by Colson Whitehead is published by Fleet
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 New Statesman, Ltd.
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"'In the US, we throw up statues of any old dimwit': Colson Whitehead, novelist." New Statesman, vol. 152, no. 5734, 15 Sept. 2023, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767134891/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b19b0178. Accessed 25 Aug. 2025.