(Photograph of Colson Whitehead © Chris Close)

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (winner of both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize), The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and a collection of essays, The Colossus of New York.

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim, Whiting Writers Award, and the Dos Passos Prize, his writing has appeared in a number of publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta.

He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming. Currently, he lives in New York City.

The Underground Railroad

#1 New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the National Book Award
Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.