After graduating from college, Whitehead wrote for
The Village Voice. While working at the
Voice, he began drafting his first novels. Early in his career, Whitehead lived in
Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Whitehead has since produced 11 book-length works—nine novels and two nonfiction works, including a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of
E. B. White's famous 1949 essay
Here Is New York. Whitehead's books are
The Intuitionist (1999);
John Henry Days (2001);
The Colossus of New York (2003);
Apex Hides the Hurt (2006);
Sag Harbor (2009); 2011's
Zone One, a
New York Times bestseller; 2016's
The Underground Railroad, which earned a
National Book Award for Fiction;
The Nickel Boys (2019);
Harlem Shuffle (2021); and
Crook Manifesto (2023).
Esquire magazine named
The Intuitionist the best first novel of the year, and
GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium". Novelist
John Updike, reviewing
The Intuitionist in
The New Yorker, called Whitehead "ambitious", "scintillating", and "strikingly original", adding: "The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead."
The Intuitionist was nominated as the Common Novel at
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The Common Novel nomination was part of a longtime tradition at the Institute that included such authors as
Maya Angelou,
Andre Dubus III,
William Joseph Kennedy, and
Anthony Swofford. Whitehead's nonfiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including
The New York Times,
The New Yorker,
Granta, and ''
Harper's. In 2017, the novel was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction at the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Colson was honored with the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for fiction presented by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. The Underground Railroad'' won the
2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Whitehead's seventh novel,
The Nickel Boys, was published in 2019. It was inspired by the story of the
Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where children convicted of minor offenses suffered violent abuse. In conjunction with its publication, Whitehead was featured on the cover
Time magazine's July 8, 2019, edition, alongside the
strap-line "America's Storyteller". Judges of the prize called the novel "a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". It was Whitehead's second win, making him the fourth writer to win the prize twice. In 2022, it was announced that Whitehead will executive produce the upcoming
film adaptation of the same name. Whitehead's eighth novel,
Harlem Shuffle, was conceived and begun before he wrote
The Nickel Boys. It is a work of crime fiction set in Harlem during the 1960s.
Harlem Shuffle was published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021.
Crook Manifesto, Whitehead's ninth novel and a follow-up to
Harlem Shuffle, was published on July 18, 2023.
Cool Machine, Whitehead's tenth novel and the conclusion to his "Harlem Trilogy," will be published on July 21, 2026. ==Personal life==