Whitehead wins fiction Pulitzer for ‘ Railroad’
Matar, Thompson, Desmond, Nottage are also recognized
The Underground Railroad, an inventive and searing take on slavery in 1850s Georgia, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday, adding to author Colson Whitehead’s list of accolades and bolstering the case for the book to be included in the pantheon of Great AmericanNovels.
Published on Aug. 2, Railroad also won the 2016 National Book Award in November.
The novel, which had significant prefelt publication buzz, became an instant best seller when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in August. ( Whitehead, 47, also was USA TODAY’s 2016 Author of the Year.)
Last year, post- vacation, President Obama gave the book another boost, saying Americans should read it. If Whitehead is breaking out the champagne, who can blame him? According to publisher Doubleday,
The Underground Railroad has sold more than 825,000 copies in the USA.
The novel, Whitehead’s sixth, mixes harsh reality — slavery in the antebel- lum South — with a vividly imagined alternative world, one in which the Underground Railroad is a literal subterranean network of tracks and stations.
Whitehead’s heroine is a headstrong teenage runaway slave named Cora who escapes a brutal cotton plantation and tries to find her way to freedom. The Pulitzer committee lauded Railroad “for a smartmelding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.”
In an interview with USA TODAY after learning he’d won the Pulitzer, Whitehead said: “My baseline happiness level has been pretty high the last 10 months.”
He said when he wrote the first 100 pages of The Underground Railroad, he he was “firing on all cylinders.” But he had no idea the novel would “have this kind of reception. I try to do the same old thing and hope it works out. This time it really did.”
When she chose Railroad, Winfrey called it “one of the most grim, gripping, powerful novels about slavery I have ever experienced.” She also alluded to the novel’s “sense of inspiration.”
Other winners: Biography or autobiography: Hisham Matar for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. History: Heather Ann Thompson for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. General non- fiction: Matthew Desmond for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Drama: Lynn Nottage for Sweat.