A Second Pulitzer for Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys wins the 2020 prize for fiction.

Photograph of Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead
Photograph by Chris Close 

In 2017, Colson Whitehead ’91 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his harrowing novel The Underground Railroad, a story that translated that fraught effort to free enslaved people from a historic metaphor to an actual system of tracks and trains propelling Cora, his protagonist, on her northbound escape from slavery. Today Whitehead received a second Pulitzer for his equally harrowing novel The Nickel Boys, honored as “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.”

For more about Whitehead, read “A Literary Chameleon,” a profile from this magazine’s archives.

The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to another Harvard affiliate, Jericho Brown, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2009-2010, for The Tradition, “A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.”

You might also like

Two Momentous Faculty Retirements

Arthur Kleinman and Harry Lewis depart the classroom.

Five Questions with Cass R. Sunstein

The Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar on what Star Wars can tell us about today’s Supreme Court

Harvard Releases Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Task Force Reports

University publishes findings from thorough examinations of campus conditions.

Most popular

Update: Harvard Encampment Ends

As protest numbers dwindled, organizers and administrators reached an agreement

Harvard Releases Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Task Force Reports

University publishes findings from thorough examinations of campus conditions.

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

Explore More From Current Issue

The Trump Administration's Impact on Higher Education

Unprecedented federal actions against research funding, diversity, speech, and more

89664

Jessica Shand—Math and Music at Harvard

Jessica Shand blends math and music.

89677

Paper Peepshows at Harvard's Baker Library

How “paper peepshows” brought distant realms to life

89684