Colson Whitehead: ‘The publishing world is still very white. It’s getting better, but there’s a lot more room for improvement’

Last year, Colson Whitehead — at the age of 52 — decided that it was a good time to get his driver’s license. “I was successful. I grew up in New York, so I never really had to drive. But I felt bad for my wife, because she always has to take the kids, go shopping… then, when the pandemic was over, I decided to try some new things. Getting my license was one of them.” Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 for his novel The Underground Railroad. In 2020, he did it again with The Nickel Boys.

“The first time, I was in a good mood for a whole year. The second time happened during the pandemic and I was on to other things,” he recalls. The Underground Railroad was the title that established him. Before it came out, he had already published six novels and two works of non-fiction, achieving the rare balance of being both respected by critics and selling reasonably well. He had enough in the bank to live a comfortable life. But this novel was something else: it not only won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award: it was also praised by Barack Obama. Above all, Whitehead’s 2017 publication was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club — a machine for creating bestsellers.

“Sometimes I get the impression that the topics my books deal with may sound stupid. I wrote a book about elevator inspectors… who would want to read that?” he jokes, referring to The Intuitionist (1999), his first novel.

“When Oprah picked up The Underground Railroad, it drew a lot of people to my book who would normally see it in a bookstore and say, ‘This sounds stupid.’ It had a very strong run [during] the first two weeks. Then, it kept growing and growing on its own.”

The novel has sold more than a million copies, but it wasn’t an easy process: it took the author 14 years to decide to write it.

As a child, the imaginative Colson — a kid who locked himself in his room reading Marvel comics — decided that he wanted to be a writer. “I used to think, ‘wouldn’t it be cool to write Spider-Man comics?’”

When he learned about the Underground Railroad — the name of the network that, during the 19th century, helped escaped slaves from the South reach the northern states or Canada — Whitehead thought about this metaphor in real terms. He imagined a train line with convoys, conductors and stations, all running underground.

As an adult — having read and admired the magical realism of García Márquez and Borges — he considered turning his childhood vision into a book. But the task of writing a novel about slavery overwhelmed him. “I was thinking about it for 14 years. Every time I finished a book, I thought, ‘Am I ready to write it?’ And the answer was always no. Until I realized that I had avoided it for a long time, but the idea hadn’t gone away.”

He won the Pulitzer again for his next novel, The Nickel Boys — a terrifyingly realistic tale about a reform school in Florida that abused pupils for decades. All of Whitehead’s work revolves around the feeling of defenselessness before authority and being Black in the United States, but in this novel’s case, the discomfort is almost physical.

“I’m always attentive to what’s happening around me. For me — and I’m not the only one — any moment could be the one that changes my life forever. A character from The Nickel Boys said it: leaving home five minutes earlier or five minutes later can change your life. And I definitely feel that in New York. You never know if this is the cop, if this is the moment when your life changes. I’ve felt that since I was a teenager. And I’m over 50 now.”

In 2021, Whitehead published The Harlem Shuffle. The novel’s protagonist is a furniture salesman, who becomes a fence at night. His store is on 125th Street — the same as the Apollo Theater and the already-closed Hotel Theresa, the heart of what had been the Black neighborhood of Manhattan since the 1940s. While the story is set in 1965, little remains of that neighborhood today.

“The original immigrants who lived in Harlem came from Italy, Germany and Ireland. There were also Jews. They lived in the brownstone townhouses that real-estate speculators built. In the 1920s, black immigrants from the South arrived. Ironically, the young people who are moving there now are the great-grandchildren of the first immigrants. They left Harlem and went to the suburbs and their descendants are coming because Harlem is cheap. And it’s safer now than 50 years ago. There was a heroin epidemic, a crack epidemic, but for the last 20 years, it’s been on the way up.”

After two difficult books, The Harlem Shuffle heralded a lighter trilogy, in which the same protagonists will feature in the second part, set in the 1970s, and in the third, set in the 1980s.

“This book has a much humbler origin. One day, my wife was driving and I was thinking about what movie [we could rent online] that night. Maybe Ocean’s 11, which would be the millionth time we’ve seen it. And I thought it must be a lot of fun to write something like that movie. I was envious of Steven Soderbergh and asked myself: ‘Could I write a heist novel?’ And so, I gave myself permission.”

When asked if he would like Soderbergh to make a movie adaptation of his novel, Whitehead laughs. “He must be very busy!”

At the moment, The Underground Railroad is the only one of Whitehead’s novels that has made it to the screen, as an Amazon Prime miniseries directed by Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning director of Moonlight.

“I don’t put faces to my characters. So, their faces are always somewhat blurred. My last trip before Covid was to visit the set and it was really miraculous to see the cast: they were my characters. Or seeing 100 people, this huge team, working on a scene using details that I wrote years before. For example, I wrote that a wagon was red without giving importance to the detail. It was random… but there was a wagon and it was red, because that’s what’s in the book.”

Whitehead comes from a prominent family: his parents ran an executive recruitment company and he studied at Harvard. “It was good. [At Harvard]. I read many authors for the first time: James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett... but they were very classic. There was only one class devoted to literature after 1945.”

He started writing in the 1990s, for The Village Voice.

“I wasn’t a journalist,” he clarifies. “I wrote mostly book reviews and music reviews… reviews of TV [shows]. I never interviewed people, I’m terrible at it. But working with publishers and being forced to publish taught me a lot.”

In the end, he got what he always wanted: he was able to become a writer. Not writing articles or teaching, but working quietly from home.

“I’m not one of those [novelists] who go to coffee shops. At home, I can take a nap or eat a sandwich. Writing from 10 to three seems fine to me. My goal is eight pages a week. That’s 32 a month, which means that, in 10 months, I have a 300-page novel. That’s my rhythm.”

On several occasions, Whitehead has said that Toni Morrison is his greatest reference. When asked about the state of Black literature in the United States today, he replies: “My first book, The Intuitionist, is about elevator inspectors, which is actually a weird metaphor for race. Could it have been published in 1960? No, because [back then], you had to be more social realist [and] talk about issues facing the Black community more directly. But now there are so many more Black writers doing their own thing, with different inspirations.”

“The publishing world is still very white. If you go to Random House’s US offices, there are very few Black editors… even now, when the sales charts are a little more diverse than they were four years ago. It’s getting better, but there’s a lot more room for improvement.”

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