Most authors, when interviewed, will tell you that they wrote their book because creativity had been bubbling up inside them since childhood, and they had always known there was a novel within just struggling to get out. Others will tell you that they were suddenly obsessed by a certain subject, place, person or time. Paul Beatty author of the 2015 novel Sellout, claims that he wrote his pro-marijuana novel because he was flat broke.
The novel takes place in and around Los Angeles, California, and centers around a protagonist who grows watermelon and marijuana. He wants to bring back segregation in his neighborhood because he wants a slave all for himself. This leads to a well-publicized legal battle and a trip to the Supreme Court. It is highly satirical and entirely politically incorrect, quite deliberately making fun of the social taboos that make us terrified of saying or doing anything that is politically incorrect. Cleverly, by making us laugh about some of the things that society tells us are important, the author manages to make us think, and sometimes change our opinions, with his satire. This comes as news to Beatty; he does not think of himself as a satirist, and worried that the perceived "satire" of the novel meant that the serious subjects he dealt with in the novel were ignored, and not discussed to the level that he had intended.
Despite the author's own disquiet about the rush of critical acclaim his novel received, he nonetheless became the first American author to win the Man Booker Prize and he was also the recipient of the 2016 National Book Critics Choice Award as well. The Sellout is Paul Beatty's fourth novel as well as being the most well-received. He is also known as a poet and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.
