Colson Whitehead

Born 6 Nov 1969

From New York City, New York, United States · Nationality: United States · Writes fiction and nonfiction

Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. His works include 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.

Quotes

“I never know when I start out. You know, I sort of know what the ending is. I know where the characters always end up, and I usually have an image of the last page before I start. I’m a big outliner. But you can’t know everything and you have to be open to discovery…”
On how envisioning an ending allows him to conclude each character’s journey in
“The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.”
Harlem Shuffle 2021
“My compulsion to write the story was from seeing so many people go unpunished, and so many innocents’ stories being untold…”
On his moral imperative to write his work The Nickel Boys in “INTERVIEWS—Powell'

Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).