Colson Whitehead

About

Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of ten 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. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Whitehead was born in New York City on November 6, 1969, and grew up in Manhattan, New York. He is one of four children of successful entrepreneur parents, Arch and Mary Anne Whitehead, who owned an executive recruiting firm. As a child, Whitehead went by his first name, Arch. He later switched to Chipp, before switching to Colson. He attended Trinity School in New York City, New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1991, where he studied English and Comparative Literature. In college, he became friends with poet Kevin Young.

After graduating from college, Whitehead wrote for The Village Voice. While working at the…