Whitehead wins Pulitzer for ‘Underground Railroad’
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 American Novels.
Published on Aug. 2, Railroad also won the 2016 National Book Award in November.
The novel, which had significant pre-publication buzz, became an instant best seller when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in August.
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 Rail
road has sold more than 825,000 copies in the USA.
The novel, Whitehead’s sixth, mixes harsh reality — slavery in the antebellum South — with a vividly imagined alternative world, one in which the Under- ground Railroad is a literal subterranean network of tracks and stations. Whitehead’s heroine is a headstrong teenage runaway slave named Cora. The Pulitzer committee lauded
Railroad “for 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.”
In an interview with USA TODAY after learning he’d won the Pulitzer, Whitehead, 47, 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 felt 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. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. This time it really did.”