Colson Whitehead is one of the most acclaimed and awarded American writers at work today. To date, he has won the National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant. Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969 and graduated from Harvard University in 1991. During the 1990s, he worked as a journalist for such publications as The Village Voice before publishing his celebrated first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999.
After writing three more novels in the 2000s, Whitehead published Zone One in 2011. Notably, the work combines elements of genre literature—science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction—with...