By the time Colson Whitehead published the novel that made him a literary superstar in 2016, he already had a reputation for being both brilliant and unpredictable. His three previous books were Sag Harbor, a coming-of-age tale; Zone One, a zombie novel; and The Noble Hustle, a nonfiction book about poker.
All those books, and the three novels that preceded them, garnered critical acclaim. But nothing could prepare the literary world for The Underground Railroad, which follows an enslaved young woman in 19th-century Georgia as she makes her escape via the titular railroad—here an actual railroad, not a metaphorical one.
Oprah Winfrey selected the novel for her book club, saying it “helped [her] to better understand the past, as well as where we are as a people today.” The reviews were ecstatic, and the novel would go on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
The Underground Railroad upped the ante for imaginative literary fiction that crosses genres, leading publishers to take chances on other novels that refused to play by the rules. And it made Whitehead, already considered one of America’s best Generation X authors, one of the leading U.S. writers of any age. Three years later, when he published the Kirkus Prize–winning The Nickel Boys, he would become one of the rare authors featured on the cover of Time magazine, with the headline “America’s Storyteller.”
But by that time, Whitehead had already changed American literature, proving that when it comes to the nation’s history, it was still possible to say something new—and that our past is, sadly, never really over.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
