COLSON WHITEHEAD takes on a multitude of issues with original wit and a rich imagination. In 1999, he burst onto the literary scene with his award-winning debut novel, The Intuitionist, which concerned the travails of the first black woman elevator inspector in New York City. His second novel, John Henry Days, followed in 2001 and was met with much critical acclaim. John Updike wrote in a New Yorker review that the novel “does what writing should do; it refreshes our sense of the world.” Whitehead is also the author of The Colossus of New York, a collection of essays about his hometown, Apex Hides the Hurt, Sag Harbor, and Zone One, a zombie novel influenced by films Whitehead watched as a child. His long-awaited new novel, The Underground Railroad, is a magnificent and wrenching chronicle of a young slave’s journeys as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.