Colson Whitehead’s latest book is “a critique of capitalism and an analysis of race relations.”

Fact Is Fiction

In an interview, Colson Whitehead discusses his new novel, Crook Manifesto, cancel culture, and why he avoids reading contemporary fiction

By Johanna Thomas-Corr

For a few days in June New York had a little taste of apocalypse. Smoke from wildfires in Canada turned the sky an ill-looking orange. Visibility dropped to a few hundred meters. People searched for their masks again. Colson Whitehead stayed at home.

“I was just like, same shit different day, you know,” says the only living novelist to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice, for The Underground Railroad in 2016 and The Nickel Boys in 2019. Having seen the 1980s crack epidemic, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic come and go, Whitehead, 53, bore the haze with a New Yorker’s fatalism. “There are periods where the city’s in crisis and then we hopefully bounce back. In the 1970s crime was at an all-time high and the city was bankrupt. And out of that depressed climate we got punk and disco and hip-hop. Writers were working, artists were working. That New Yorker resilience is always there.”