Colson Whitehead Books in Order (Author of The Nickel Boys)
All of Colson Whitehead’s Books in Order!
Who is Colson Whitehead?
Colson Whitehead is a celebrated American author, one of the rare writers to have won the Pulitzer Prize twice.
It all started in 1969 when Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead was born in New York City and raised in Manhattan. He graduated from Harvard University in 1991 and began working for The Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. During this time, Whitehead also started working on his first novels.
He released his debut novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999. A speculative fiction novel, it was well-received, named the best first novel of the year by Esquire magazine, nominated as the Common Novel at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award.
This marked the beginning of a successful writing career, with more books, prizes, and honors to follow, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars Fellowship.
Whitehead has also written two non-fiction books, several essays, and reviews for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Granta, and has taught at multiple universities including Princeton, Columbia, and Wesleyan.
He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
All the Books by Colson Whitehead
All The books are accompanied by their official synopsis.
Colson Whitehead’s fiction
- The Intuitionist (1998)
It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city’s Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae’s watch, chaos ensues.
- John Henry Days (2001)
J. Sutter is a young black journalist. Sutter is a “junketeer,” a freeloading hack who roams from one publicity event to another, abusing his expense account and mooching as much as possible. It is 1996, and an assignment for a travel Web site takes Sutter to West Virginia for the first annual “John Henry Days” festival, a celebration of a new U.S. postal stamp honoring John Henry. And there the real story of John Henry emerges in graceful counterpoint to Sutter’s thoroughly modern adventure.
- Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)
The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize, is a nomenclature consultant. And, it turns out, the consultant needs them. But in a culture overwhelmed by marketing, the name is everything and our hero’s efforts may result in not just a new name for the town but a new and subtler truth about it as well.
- Sag Harbor (2009)
Benji Cooper is one of the few Black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of Black professionals have built a world of their own. The summer of ’85 won’t be without its usual trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through and state-of-the-art profanity to master. Benji will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, just maybe, this summer might be one for the ages.
- Zone One (2011)
A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street-aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong…
- The Underground Railroad (2016)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2017. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood-where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.
- The Nickel Boys (2019)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2020. When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow “delinquent” Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.
The Ray Carney Series/Harlem Trilogy
- Harlem Shuffle (2021)
To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. His cousin Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa – the “Waldorf of Harlem” – and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.
- Crook Manifesto (2023)
Sequel to Harlem Shuffle. 1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. (“Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!”), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.
Colson Whitehead’s non-fiction books
- The Colossus of New York (2003)
A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories.
In 2011, Grantland magazine gave bestselling novelist Colson Whitehead $10,000 to play at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It was the assignment of a lifetime, except for one hitch-he’d never played in a casino tournament before. With just six weeks to train, our humble narrator took the Greyhound to Atlantic City to learn the ways of high-stakes Texas Hold’em.
Check out the books of Elizabeth Strout, another Pulitzer Prize winner!
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