Colson Whitehead

Whitehead grew up in Manhattan, the son of parents who ran an executive-search firm, and studied at Harvard before spending years as a critic at The Village Voice, where repeated novel rejections preceded his own strange debut, The Intuitionist, about a Black elevator inspector. He works across radically different genres, from zombie apocalypse in Zone One to poker journalism in The Noble Hustle.

The Underground Railroad, which literalizes the metaphor as an actual subterranean train, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in the same year. The Nickel Boys, drawn from the real history of Florida's Dozier School for Boys, a reform school where students were tortured and killed, won him a second Pulitzer, making him one of the few novelists to win it twice.

He continues to alternate between historical reckoning and genre experiment, resisting being pinned to any single mode.