Hopefully it will translate to a better outcome in November’s election than the one we had four years ago.”It sounds, I say, like he is willing himself to to be optimistic. Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. At a time of unprecedented unrest, Colson Whitehead has reached some milestones worth celebrating of late. Colson Whitehead THE NICKEL BOYS is my latest book. That’s all he will say about it. The description “America’s Storyteller” seems suddenly even more apposite. In April, he became the fourth author — plus the … “Politicians don’t read,” he replies bluntly, though famously Obama, admittedly the exception, enthusiastically endorsed As a teenager, Whitehead listened to post-punk and new-wave music. His parents were both successful professionals who ran an executive recruiting company and sent their children to private schools.He recalls, too, how he and his brother were once stopped on the sidewalk by a curious old white man, who inquired “if we were the sons of a diplomat. We have a botched pandemic, we have a militaristic response to peaceful protests, we have unprecedented corruption going on behind the scenes It’s all happening at once in this horrible convergence and we are all witnesses to it.”Colson Whitehead grew up Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the third of four children: two older sisters and a slightly younger brother. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius Grant"). He is the author of seven novels, including his 1999 debut work, The Intuitionist, and The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys. Colson Whitehead’s two Pulitzer-winning novels explore America’s history of racial injustice. “It’s kind of weird,” he says, chuckling, “but, hey, hopefully new wave will never go away and people will be playing bad synth-pop 50 years from now. “There were a lot of small absurdities amid the psychological horror of the pandemic – people fighting over supplies in the grocery store, subway driversHe uses the term “human nature” more than once and one senses that the writing of his past couple of books has reinforced his essential belief that, as he says at one point, “people are terrible – we invent all sorts of different reasons to hate people. From his Long Island home, he discusses protest and the crisis in American politics, and his 2011 novel about a pandemicIt is an honour he shares with a select few others, including William Faulkner and John Updike. He is ensconced with his wife, Julie Barer, a literary agent, and children – a daughter, aged 15, and a son, aged six – in their second home in East Hampton, Long Island.“I’ve been in lockdown for 12 weeks.” he says. The innocent suffer.” He had put it there to remind him what the story he was telling was really about. So, I have to think it won’t happen for my own sanity’s sake and for my children’s futures. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. “The early weeks were the worst in terms of the psychology of it. “And I think a lot of us are trying to find our way back to sanity. He cracks up laughing at the idea. It is now out in paperback. Harrisburg, PA. Like Cora, the escaped slave in “In the Dozier School, you had the actual abusers,” Whitehead continues, “but you also have a system wherein all those in positions of power looked the other way. He tells me at one point: “But, you do have to remain hopeful and believe that things will get better or what’s the point of going on?”Despite his relatively cosseted background – private school, summers in Sag Harbour in the Hamptons – Whitehead too has inevitably experienced America’s casually racist policing at first hand, but passes it off as hardly worth talking about. But, let’s see how long this can be sustained and what actually comes out of it. He has also published two books of non-fiction. The UN being half a mile away. Colson Whitehead was born in 1969 to parents running an executive recruiting company. We’ve done a pretty good job of screwing up, so the less you listen to us the better. Because – why else would black people dress like that?”From an early age, he was a voracious reader, mostly of comics, science fiction and suspense: Rod Serling, Ursula K Le Guin, Stan Lee, Stephen King. Quotes by Colson Whitehead “And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. Then you get used to it to a degree and make your adjustments. Here are virtual events: July 9: Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Also, Trump is crazy, who knows what he will try to do?