ABSTRACT
An elevator inspector. A junketeer and steel driver. A nomenclature consultant. Black kids in Long Island. Apocalypse survivors. Escaped slaves. These are the diverse protagonists of Colson Whitehead’s often uncategorisable novels. Alongside this fiction, Whitehead has also published essays on New York City, and a memoir about poker. Whitehead’s extremely varied writing transcends genre and time, but it is always firmly rooted in the complexities and vicissitudes of race and national identity in the United States. While his work can be connected to other African American writers of his generation – say Toni Morrison or Percival Everett – Whitehead’s oeuvre is distinct. Born in New York City in 1969, Whitehead is a Harvard graduate, a recipient of the Guggenheim (‘Genius Grant’) Fellowship, and winner of numerous prizes (The Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award for Fiction, Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction). Yet, until the publication of The Underground Railroad in 2016, he was not as well-known as some of his fellow American writers; he has not been, until now that is, included in the same list as Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Annie Proulx, and others. This chapter will survey Whitehead’s fiction and show how the imagination that created The Underground Railroad has been burrowing into American soil for a number of years. This chapter will suggest that the complex meanings of race and nation are at the heart of Whitehead’s literary imagination; yet, it will also argue for the idiosyncrasy and particularity of each book. In short, the chapter will show how, across his oeuvre, Whitehead is consistently revealing how African American history and memory suffuse every corner of US identity.
