Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth Colson Whitehead 20240712

Washington post columnist, thriller writer who writes about the cia and such. This month, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Colson Whitehead as our guest. His most recent book is the under ground railroad. Mr. Whitehead, whats the appropriate response new book is appraised by oprah, president obama, you won the National Book award, what is the appropriate response . If only it took the pain aw away. [laughter] has taken off in a way thats unexpected and startling and wonderful. Just try to enjoy it despite my best efforts. Why does it put you in a better mood . Ive been writing for 20 something years doing fiction 20 some years, sometimes we write a book and people dig it and understand it sometimes write a book and no one cares and its sort of disappears so i have the pride the job i did with the book. Either you dig the groups of two prospectors or you dont and so you are either along for the ride description or not. Definitely when i was writing was my second attempt at a novel. My first one was pretty terrible and it went to a bunch of publishers and everyone hated it. I went to an agent and the agent dumb to me because it wasnt going anywhere so for a year and a half i had to send to my friends imwriting a book about elevator inspectors and they make fun of me. So eventually after a year and a half in writing it i finally got down to what sounds like an interesting book and i headed to my agent, my new agent duggan and luckily double dated as well host is there a connection between that intuition is, and someone in the underground railroad . There are a couple of things i circle around, i love writing about new york, i get a lot of ideas and vitality and energy from the city. Culture, race in america, technology and some of those things are in some books, not somuch in others. My book about new york, the gloss of new york is about a racialized take on new york because new york is not black new york, my poker book , noble also. Theres not much to say about technology but those are four or five areas that i tend to circle around. Host how should people read your book . Social commentary, autobiographical . Guest sag harbor which is my fourth novel does take off from my childhood. I would say underground railroad is my lease autobiographical book just because im not in there in some sort of coded way which is probably why peoplelike it. But so i think from the beginning to the end, thats a good way, start to finish. Thats a good way to read them and some booksare funny. Some are alittle more tragic. I hope that the experience is worth your time. And sometimes the books are social commentary, sometimes their commentary on whatever weirdthing im growing through this year. Host in sag harbor are you benji with the bad haircut . Guest benji is a 50yearold kid growing up in new york in the 80s. As idid. Unfortunately my life wasnt very interesting so sadly my 1985, number of the mind is not that cool or compelling take a little bit of license. When i started the book i wanted to base characters on my friends and unfortunately whenever they appeared on the page they became less and less like my friend david or my friend scott as the book took over so it started as fairly autobiographical and im definitely in there but the demands of the story always supersede any kind of autobiographical or memoir urge. When im trying to make story means exaggerating what happened to me. Host Colson Whitehead, what is the process to get the elevator inspectors or zombies or a underground railroad that actually exists in physical form. Guest i like to mix it up and not do the same thing from book to book. If you know how to write a certain kind of book why do it again . Perhaps thats foolish but i think writing a book, thats maybe plot heavy and following up with a book thats not as plot heavy is a way to change it up and not do the same thing. A book that has a firstperson narrator, a book thats funny, maybe not so funny is a way to keep it very for me. So the last couple of books im on a perverse street. I went from sag harbor, realistic story about the 80s to an apocalyptic zombie tail to noble hustle which is a historical book to this book underground railroad which is a historical novel so im keeping it verydifferent and i think i get my ideas from articles. Just weird musings i have on my couch, a lot of times i spend a lot of time on my couch so sometimes the ideas stay with you and you get an open spot in your schedule, you can consider it, are you ready or do you want to do it, not do it and sometimes they fall away but they come from a lot ofdifferent places , my ideas. There seems to be a common theme in your book about a guy who really didnt get the rules of life, has a certain unease aroundother people. Guest thats a little biographical but i dont want to take my hand to early, were here for three hours. I want to save the goodstuff for the last hour. I think theres something about an outsider, i think whether you are misanthropic like i can be sometimes or were all sort of outsiders in different ways and an outsider makes a good observer, a good protagonist, a good storyteller. Youre in the action and also standing apart so someone who observes and is part of the scene but also a bit removed i think is a good vehicle for telling a story and definitely in theapocalypse , in the world of elevator inspectors, its nice to have a point of view character for thereader. Most of us arentelevator inspectors , sadly. So my outsider characters become a way, in addition or the reader to enter the story. Host zone one didnt come out until 2011 but i read you had written that asa young guy in the eighth or 10th grade. Guest know, i definitely was a big horror fan and for me it was a way to write horror fiction and Science Fiction. And love the zombie genre from going back decades but i wrote to terrible stories in college. Didnt really start writing fiction until my mid20s but the obsession with zombies does go back to my childhood. I had parents who love horror movies, we watched horror movies together and i remember seeing night of the living dead at an early age. That stayed with me, to refresh your memory its a story about the eve of the zombie apocalypse. People are trying to hide, dont know whats happening and the main protagonist is a black man being pursued by white people who want to devour him and eat him which of course is part ofthe story of america. So about growing up as a horrorand Science Fiction fan , five books in i thought i was ready to follow my influences. Host i got the impression there was an obsession with horror movies. Guest sure, i dont want to get all judging. But yes, a real interest. My brother and i came of age during the ec horror boom so we go to crazy eddies and rent horror movies, Science Fiction movies and every friday we go through them, return them and start over again by the next week. And it was sort of Science Fiction and horror comic books that made me want to write, i had a love of Marvel Comicswhen i was growing up. My parents would like even came novels and i would be in my brothers room and read them. So fantasy, horror has always seemed to be a potent storytelling tool. People have different ideas about what zombies mean. For me, i find my own interpretation and put my own stamp on the genre was sort of fun and important for me. Host what does zombies mean to you . Guest i think different generations interpret different horror genres according to their own needs. I think like dracula. Vampires mean something in the 19th century england and they mean Something Different to the twilight generation. Zombies mean Something Different now. To me theyve always been an expression of social anxiety, fear of otherpeople. A zombie store you go to bed and your loved ones, neighbors, teachers, coworkers are so many zombies out to get you read a stop pretending to read theyve always been monsters but they let themask down and now they are out to get to and speaks poorly of my psychology that i interpret zombies that way. The sort of zombie myth has always stayed with me and i finally felt ready to tackle it. I have these various ideas in the back of my head ready to be on the page. Host is social anxietya common trait among novelists . Guest idont know. Im not sure. I think it helps to, worrying about your work, worrying about your job is maybe a good fill for being a novelist it helps you not coast. Host worrying about what others may think of your work. Guest know, doing a good job, i think its anxiety versus worry. I think a healthy amount of worry else you make sure that putting everything into this paragraph, into that page, making sure its coming out right even if youve done eight books and this is your ninth book and you have eight books under your belt. Host in the new yorker in 2012 your quoted as sayingto be a good novelist, for you , its to fully inhabit one solution to get intoevery kooky aspect of ones freakish. Its a handy survival strategy. Guest well, i think what i like about my different books is they are sort of odd and allowed to express different aspects of the world, different theories and i think writing is becoming a way for me tointerpret the world for myself , to figure out how i feelabout things. About societal systems, politics, so that license is very important for me. Not being tied to expectations, following my own inclinations and just because writing a book about elevator inspectors sounds like a bad idea, adumb idea , can you make it work and can you sell to the reader at the same time youre selling it to yourself so the delusion that you have something to say, the delusion that your work is worthy of being read by others i think is useful for being an artist. Host where did the germ of the idea for the intuitionist come from . Did you see an inspector . Guest im in the aforementioned book that everyone hated. Host what was thatbook about either way . Guest remember gary coleman the tv star . Little black boy . He was a tv critic at the time writing about black imagery and pop culture so i figured ill write a novel about a gary coleman type child star who grows up and has misadventures and it seemed like a good idea tome. And in the novel hes on a sitcom called im moving in because he was always getting adopted by rich white people. Said im moving in and she sent out the book and everyone hated it. I think i became a writer then, i was going to get a real job and become a lawyer. Maybe people will like it, maybe they want but ill learn to write by the end of it. People like plot, maybe ill have a plot driven book, try that. I write a lot of detective novels and studied suspense and i thought i was watching 20 20 as i often do. In those days in my 20s. In the 1990s. And there was an article, a piece on the hidden things in escalators. Apparently if you dont repair escalators they can detach from the sides and remove a toe, its a terrible thing obviously and they had an escalator inspector that they interviewed and i thought that the random job and as im growing up in new york you always see, theres a law not necessarily enforced anymore but the elevator inspector signs the certificate, ive been here, everythings fine. They come once a year and suddenly you see that the elevator inspector has been there. Wouldnt it be cool if an elevator inspector had to become an inspector and solve thecriminal case . Aha, funny, postmodern detective story so i went to the library to see what kind of skills and elevator inspector would bring to a criminal case andof course the answer was not because they are elevator inspectors. So it became not like a murder mystery but holding the mystery of afallen elevator and i made up a different culture for elevator inspectors. I figured they are conservative and progressive and that became the empiricists versus the intuitionist who are progressive and that duality plays out in thebook in different ways. And so maybe i was trying to teach myself how to write. I hadnt had a female protagonist before so when i put the female protagonist, i hadnt had a book that had a plot or any kind of linear momentumso to try and do that. And then i took it this weird whimsical idea of elevator inspector,solving a criminal case. Host prior to starting this you look at your books on the table and said sorry for the clunkers that you had to read. What do you consider to be a clunker . Guest i think theyre all pretty good but hopefully if you do something for a long time and get better at it , certain books i wonder, why did i use so many adjectives . Wasnt there a simple wayof doing that . Ill lose a page or two here and there and hopefully im a betterwriter and ill learn how to do things in a more efficient way. Focally you get better and better than obviously you start sucking but hopefully im still in Getting Better phase and Getting Better at my job, learning from each book and taking that to the next one. Host does im movingin still exist . Guest the manuscript is there. For a while i thought maybe ill strip mine for good similes or something but its really terrible and the energy it would take to bring it up to my very high standards now are probably better spent writing Something Else so its in my drawer and if my children have a gambling debt, they can sell it to somebody 30 years from now. Make some quick cash. On broker. Host lila may watson is one ofyour female protagonists, cora is another. Whats the reason to write through a womans point of view . Guest i think women exist and if you tell different stories you should pick differentpoints of view so thats part of that. I had a string of male protagonists before this book so it seems sort of wise to mix it up. I think if you know to do something, why do it so when lila may watson i couldnt do my kids are new york voice, that was in my first novel. I was forced to, or i chose a third person narrator. So i couldnt rely upon my first person narrator tricks. A female protagonist i had done before and by doing it i could hopefully become a betterwriter. And then with cora, i had a female narrators ina row, mix it up. Theres a famous narrative written by Harriet Jacobs called instance in the life of a slave girl she writes about how when a slave girl becomes a slave woman she turns into a much more terrible form of slavery. You are now trade to desires you worked before and youre supposed to pump out babies because more babies means more slaves, more property for your master so that predicament of female slaves seemed worthy of exploring. Sometimes im mixing up, sometimes i want to learn something and keep the challenges going. Host what was your favorite one to write . Guest i think, this book was hard to write because i was broke read this book is hard to write because i was broke and also depressed. There are a lot of different challenges and then you finish and look back on these and think these are pretty terrible it was a special time in my life. So i think with the noble hustle, perhaps that was a freudian slip but that was the most fun to write that its a humor book taking off from a trip i took to the world series of poker. I just tried to cram as many jokes as i could in their area theres a journalistic framework so theres Linear Movement but i really was just trying to cram as many weird jokes and put myself into it and it was really fun. I think it started from a journalistic assignment, theres a magazine called flatland which is pop culture and sports for a couple of years and they had great writing and they called me up to see if i wanted to write about the world series of poker. I was like no, i dont want to go to vegas, its very hot but then i said what if instead of paying for the article we paid your entrance fee and you had to go to the world series and i said okay, illdo that. I didnt actually know how to play poker so i started cramming. I would drop my daughter off at school and the other parents would say what are you up to and id say im going to Atlantic City to train for a poker tournament so i gamble and gamble and come back in a night and i got to the world series and you know, i mostly stayed at home and for the first time i had toget out of my comfort zone. Have a five foot area in my couch so get out of my comfort zones, learn how to play poker so i wouldnt embarrass myself, new york at the world series of poker. And then when i was writing it, i was writing an article , when youre writing a novel you write for joke, make yourself laugh and its a few years before someone else reads it and you feel stupid writing our own jokes for a while. Like dickens did back in the day and does the ascii, you get that Immediate Response and people like it and it gave me energy to keep going. So these are very special writing experience in terms of the material, in terms of how it came to the so i look upon that six months very fondly. Let me paraphrase the first line of that book which is i got to wear sunglasses inside. It was good for me becauseim half dead anyway. For years ive been told i have a good poker face and i realized that because i was half dead inside. Which people think for that half mask of a good poker player so that aspect was for once an asset. In a social situation. You want me to unpack being half dead . Host lets unpack this a little bit, you do right about having a mask on. You do write about the fact that you are semidepressed, hermetic in your writing and that youre a different personwhen youre done with the book. Is that important, is that pain or depression important your writing . I think partially it is and partially i think its good to have a healthy joking relationship with most things you do in life either its art or anything else. So not taking myself too seriously i think isimportant. I think in terms of sharing how i feel about my work with other people, demystifying it is important. Most writers i know would have sort of just been crawling along the payment trying to write some pages and hand them in so no one gets an arcade and we can keep doing what we like to do so a lot of times writing is unpleasant. It also you dont have to be great when you write a new sentence or character or figure out a problem youve been working on but for me, not taking it too seriously and i think the character of a depressive shut in i think is fun to play and its partially true and also its also sort of a default setting in my Public Relations so what the heck, go for it. What was the easiest book to write . Theyre all pretty hard i have to say. Im going to go with the shorter one. Apex is pretty short. The book im working on nowis pretty short. So short isnt easy it tends to not prolong the agony of a 400 pager. When you win thepulitzer at the National Book award , praised by oprah, praised by president obama, that put a lot of pressureon the next book . I think theres always pressure. I think imposed on myself because i wanted to be good and i want to do Something Different and i dont want to coast. So fortunately when i get good news and im in the middle of something i can feel a little bit good and i start working the next day and its like this book sucks and its a terrible job. So its always hard, its hard when you dont know what youre doing and the pressure is really selfimposed so its always been there either its learning how to write a book. Youd better not be broke so get a real job while youre doing this so theres also always some kind of weird pressure on you whether everything is goingwell for things are going well. Will come to book tv on cspan2, this is our monthly Index Program and this entire year you are doing a special fiction edition with selling fiction authors area and this month our author is bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead. Heres a list of his books, we referred to several of them throughout the first half hour so i want to give you a full list. The intuitionist is his first book that came out in 1998, John Henry Days 2001, the colossus of new york 2003, apex hides the herd came out in 2006, sag harbor 2009. Zone one about the zombies 2011. The noble hustle which we talked about, a Nonfiction Book 2014 and of course his most recent, the underground railroad which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book award etc. Area and we want to have your participation this afternoon in our conversation. Heres how you can participate. 2227488200 and if you live in east and central time zones, 2027488201. For those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones, now we have avril show media sites you can also contact Colson Whitehead. We got facebook, twitter, instagram, at book tv is the handle you need to remember for those three and here is our email addressas well. Book tv at cspan. Org. Will begintaking those comments and calls in a few minutes. What is the first line that you wrote in Theunderground Railroad . What are the first words you put to paper . Guest the opening line, the first time shes approached aboutrunning north and she said no. I always do an outline before i start working. I have to know the beginning and the end and the last couple of books ive known the last line of the book before i started writing and im sort of writing towards that. That first line i think came very quickly when i was ruminating and organizing the book and survived the horrible debt and process to get into the book. Its a genius and two days later, i dont know why you put it that way. In this case the first line i was durable and sturdy and i think it spoke to that one sentence and stayedwith me. From the underground railroad about the grave robbers. Linda, the negro became a human being read only then was even white mans equal. This is from a section that takes place in the early part of the 19th century theres a doctor whos going to medical school and the book, does take a sort of eccentric route to American History red the main storyline takes place in 1850, that was my mental year on the book that was my cut off for technology and certain slang. And then there are certain side stories in the book. Explore from a supporting cast so in that section doctor stevens who meets cora later in his life is a young medical student in the 19th century read how do you learn about biology, you use cadavers, where you get cadavers, you dig them up so theres a healthy trade in brave rotting and medical schools would buy these illicit bodies, people would go and compete to find fresh cadavers. There against, they beat each other up if they came into each other at the same graveyard. So doctor stevens who sees himself as very liberal is musing and is talking about prejudice and boston in 19th century and uses that to spiked racial prejudice, despite the aspersions cast upon black folks in america. Ironically, when they used for dissection, these folks become equal. These 10 folds are elevated only in depth. To a level of equality and so one of the many uplifting moments in the book. Host did you know youwere going to write about that when you started the book . Guest i mentionedthe outline, yes. I didnt necessarily know that georgia would be the start area it could have been florida or South Carolina but a white supremacist state, a black utopian state and then i knew i wanted to have the opening be an overture of a slaves life so coras grandmother, for six pages we call follow her from africa to the Middle Passage two different plantations and i figured i would give atypical slaves story and move on to coras life and it seemed those short sixpage chapters could be a way to open up the world to a place that cora cant go. So while i was writing the book even though i did have a strong structure, different characters were auditioning for those short biographical chapters of doctor stevens in medical school, mabel, coras mother gets hers and after a certain section i would think who should get them, after North Carolina we need a husband and wife team whove taken cora in, was more interesting, morgan or ethel . What can martins upbringing bring to the book area i give him that sort of page, what can ethel ring to the butch book and i get to that stage even though i do have a strong structure before i start ill get to the open and obviously the process the book takes you and most short sections are very useful in terms of getting voice to how the book was evolving. Anyone read the underground railroad as historical fiction . If you are wellversed in historical fiction youll know that this section didnt actually happen in 1815, im movingsomething from the late 19th century. I had the idea to make the underground railroad this metaphor into something real, thats what it stands for an idea i had on my couch years ago so fromthe conception , theres a fantastic element, its not a straightforward historical novel which meant i could do a lot of Different Things in the book. Have these different alternative americas and i think has the book power and successful consumption comes from having a fantastic structure. But no, it was not a straightforward historical novel. I take many liberties and i guess my motto when i was writing the book was i wouldnt stick to the facts but i would stick to the truth, a larger american truth is not bound by chronology, that actually happened but different kinds of connections that i can make and give to the reader by moving differenthistorical episodes around. Host Colson Whitehead did the random plantation exists, did you visit these places in your research . B5 the random plantation where cora is enslaved is my own creation. In doing the research, i had the latitude to make my own plantation and i think from pop culture a lot of us have that idea of a plantation with 100 slaves. But you could be one of three slaves and a small family farm area it could be on a midsized plantation, you could be a domestic slave in a townhouse in baltimore so i ran with my own creation and it borrows from a plantation that actually works but it serves my artistic needs. Interms of visiting plantations , i was two thirds of the way through and i figured lets be a real writer and do some Field Research so i flew to new orleans with my wife and took two plantations worth and i got on the tour bus, i was the only black personon the tour bus. And were going north and the tour guide is getting her spiel. And this is a river road that would take goods fromnorthern louisiana down to new orleans, the port city and it was very complicated , running plantation wasnt just sitting on your porch tricking mint juleps. You have to keep track of the accounts, keep track of the workers and once you bring in seven mint juleps and the workers as opposed to slaves, obviously im not in a rigorously historically vigorous travelogue and i went to two places. The whitney plantation which is the museum devoted to the slave experience. Its great, you should go and for a fiction writer just stealing the atmosphere in my skin, the sounds of the insects, seeing that implements and then getting names, they would describe how they had various exhibits to how much slaves were sold. One people came and for me im just writing down names and some of those i got from the whitney plantation that are in the book. How muchpeople were sold for , all that sort of grim stuff and let me get back on the bus, go to the next plantation, the old galley plantation which youve seen in movies of the unsafe film the video there and its sort of that stereo typical. And you know, if you want an antebellumthemed wedding i guess you can rent costumes and have a slavery themed wedding. They have hotel rooms and im not sure, on the website it says if you want to break free fromhotel chains , you can stayhere. Get it . So but writing a book about slavery and getting peoples Actual Stories, coming across early 21st entry ironies about race and the absurd way we deal with race, nothing compared to the Actual Stories of slaverythemselves. So it was a weird adventure and yes, i did goes to some plantations for research. Host you had an africanamerican on this tour, did the tour guide ignore you or spend too much time talkingto you . Guest neither, i felt neither under the microscope or ignored. I think you get the same speech two times a day, three times a year. Its a script someone wrote and they dont even think about it. Its a lot about how we think about slavery, we dont necessarily think about daytoday conditions for slaves. The complete way of dehumanizing apparatus of slavery. We dont examine our assumptions about what it costs in terms of peoples families, psychologies so in the same way she gives her speech about louisiana plantation life, a lot of us dont necessarily think about slavery and that sort of deep and thorough way that would give us a complete understanding of it this fiction is new to us here at cspan as well and it became almost a month long read for a lot of my colleagues at cspan to read the underground Work Railroad and some submitted questions and i want to read you one of our colleague Dan Davenport to finished your book and she wants to know about the five ads for escaped slavesin the book. One is cora, are the other ones actualads from newspapers . Guest they are. The university of North Carolina advertised runaway slave ads and they have a great digital archive and they invited me to speak so in a couple of days im going down there and hopefully i can express my gratitude to their digital archive so when a slave runs away, what do you do have to mark you place aclassified ad in the newspaper. And as a fiction writer i like hearing peoples voices, like hearing how peoples spoke and you cant compete with the line runaway slave ads read they encapsulate so much in so little space. The format usually like 50 for my slave betsy who ran away for no reason at all. Why area she had a downcast expression. Of course. A burn on an arm from an accident, how to getthat accident . Last seen in the vicinity of edmonton farm, the Free Black Community so whats that free blackcommunity, how did you get that bird . Theres so many levels of denial in the ad. That i decided to stick them in their. Copyright laws being what they are no ones going to sue me, i can just put themin their there also when i was doing the research , i was struck with sort of a novel observation but you have to be a farmer orslave master to the system. You can be a journalist working in a newspaper writing a classified ad and your part of, youre upholding the slavesystem and the enterprise. Your part of a link in the chain that keeps the system going area youre a blacksmith and you make shackles but also you make the iron rims for the wheels that are taking, for the cards that are taking cotton to the market. Youre making nails for the houses that are popping up in thesenew slave economy towns. So you know, when i was researching, i ended up thinking a lot about how fast enterprise was and theres a blacksmith and classified ads down there. To broaden the idea or broaden our idea and the scope of the world of how fast and insidious the slave system was you have a line in their everybody is working for you eli whitney. Guest the inventor of the cotton gin read the slave masters and and the ridgeway was sort of the antagonist in thebook, a slave catcher. Shes as much afraid of the system as anyone in bondage. Everyone is cropping it up, everyone istaught in this insidious grip. Host Colson Whitehead, did i miss read this or is there a sympatheticaspect to ridgeway . Guest i think he recognizes his humanity. I wanted a wellrounded, compelling protagonist for my formidable protagonist cora and i think you should see yourself in the villains. It makes them threedimensional and recognizable. It makes themlive. Hes a terrible person, has a terrible philosophy but in the same way that when cora is revealing her flaws you see her as a human being, when you see ridgeways moment of weakness where he recognizes selfdeception and how he sees the world, you can recognize thatquality in yourself , thats what makes fiction work or makes art work, that recognition. When you teach a class you thought several universities over the years, what are two things you want students to leave with . We have three months so people can write 3 stories. But if you, i teach undergrads and if you only write stories about 18yearold girls from new jersey because her and 18yearold girl from new jersey, why not go crazy and write a story about a 23yearold slave from pennsylvania area if you only write fantasy, try a realistic story and vice versa. You have three months to be sympathetic or semisympathetic, workshopand audience. Try these different stories. If you always avoid the firstperson voice, try it. Why do you avoid it . Maybe it actually works for you and you have some sort of trepidation about expressing yourself so thats one thing area you have three months to fail and pick yourself up and try Something Different so use it. And then i think if you find an author that you really love sometimes im teaching people who are going to be architects, engineers and bankers and theres the one art class and people like lori moore or junot diaz or cc packer or people you might not necessarily read once they get out of school. If theres someone you like, Read Everything by them. And figure out why youre attracted to their work, what makes them compelling and then find out what kind of writer you want to be and then write a lot, find out what writer you actually are are two Different Things but thats kind of the inspiring voices we encounter as we are finding our own voice are important. Host was it hard for you to write your antagonist as a white southerner . Sure, i mean no more than having a elevator inspector but as a human being and i know people and youre always drawing upon your own knowledge of yourself where you see other people but what you speculate about whatmakes other people operate. Whatever sort of small insights you have about humanity so if you have a big cast like the underground railroad because, if you have a small cast in the book like sagharbor , youre always finding yourself in different characters and finding a place where your different and hopefully to let you know about yourself and other people, making characters are not like you recognizable on the page. Another colleague whos been reading all your books and tweeting it out, i think youve retweeted him a couple of times had questions from several books that im going to start with the intuitionist area he wanted to know who was james fulton . James fulton, its funny because the first one i think about is you write a book and its not yours anymore and people have questions and academics have questions so i remember when the book came out i was invited to a college and someone asked me so james fulton, obviously based on call and i said no, i look out thewindow and thats the first name i saw. So james fulton is the inventor of the intuitions school of elevator inspection and the intuition is can step into an elevator and divine whats wrong with it like using the force and hopefully the elevator inspectors in your community do it the right way like the empiricist but in my book the intuition us are sort of insurgent, progressive force for the apartments of elevator inspectors and jamesfulton is the man whos come up with their philosophy. I grew up in the 80s and went to college in the 80s and so that meant wars between the candidness and the multiculturalists. So it seemed when i made my elevator inspectors school you could have that conservative and progressive more play out and so the empiricists are conservative and the intuition is are those kind of multiculturalists fighting the establishment and james fulton with the sacred tests text intuition is an and at this point either my book sounds good or bad my descriptions but let go back to your first question, either the book sounds coolat this point or sounds totally stupid. [laughter] im retweeting my ownfeelings about writing the book. And perhaps my book. I have literally no book idea what you just said but im sure the audience followed you closely. Is sag harbor a real place western mark. Sag harbor is a realplace on the tip of long island. Hamptons, this will community for the last couple of decades and the town of sag harbor is sort of nestled in this more famous part of the hamptons but southhampton and theres an old whaling town mentioned in moby dick. A lot of kids went from that part of Long Islandsound , and starting in the 30s and 40s there were africanamerican doctors, lawyers, teachers started going out there. Getting summer places, they had some extra money and started acommunity and it was a safe place to go your kids. Sort of by wordofmouth, people in harlem are going in the 30s and 40s. They tell their cousin innew jersey and they start coming. So my mom started going out there in the 40s. Id spend my summers out there. I grew up in the city but would go out there every summer to college so the book is based on myadventures in sag harbor the town. Here you write was there anything worse than a bigger kid laying keep away with your stuff . Dreary rehearsal for adults. Guest i mean, the character of benji is 15 and theres a lot of identity formation. I think hes figuring out where he is part of his community. Where he deviates from his community. His peers, hes a black kid who likes bauhaus and susie and the banshees is that okay or can you like run dmc or candy like both . Figuring out what is to be a person and artifact and a lot of that was sort of weird identity battles continuing as you get older. A kind of psychological warfare that youre engaging with your community and the world. I think when youre a teenager we sort of wake up and be an individual. Host what does it meanto be boozy . Guest boozy is sort of an upscale low class pretensions. And it means like youve made it. Sometimes theres anxiety about making it and theres also embracing the fact that youre a little bit posh. Host back to sag harbor. Getting rid of your sad house, that wasunforgettable. Like selling your kids officer service you still have your sad house . See my mom is living out the. She moaned it, its not mine but whatslovely about the place that people have been known for going out there for generations. And mygrandparents and their peers , the kids grew up in them and their grandkids. They spent their summers in them and of course, anyplace in the world, the Community Changes and i dont want to call itgentrified but a lot of families used to go out there. Youre not going to go out to sag harbor anymore so you sell your house and these people take over the neighborhood. The people like this lovely piece of land with the black part of town and then in the 21st century realized its a nice beachfront property and so its more integrated now. So it has changed from when i was a kid and part of the book is trying to talk about that place and its really a sort of moment before it becomes part of the hamptons proper and it really sort of in a posh environment. Host what was your moms reaction and was your dad still alive when sag harbor came out. Guest my dad passed away a short time before, not sure how much she wouldve liked it. My mom dug it. Not sure howmuch my friends would like it. And then it came out and everyone from out there seemed to embrace it. I ran into my friend jeff and theres a jeff like character in the book and he said i hear im in your book. Host is he nick or mt . Guest hes somebody hes like i heard im in yourbook and i said yeah. I havent read it but i hear its good, how come you didnt have me do the audiobook. He did voiceover work and i kept coming up to my friends in the book. I heard a minute but no one really bothered, and it anyone was in the book didnt bother. So i should pick it up. If your mom read it and what was her reaction to this line and again, this is a fiction book but when youre a madefortv family and when he called action, we had our marks and delivered our lines like pros. The scripts were all the same. We had the formulas down. Actually that doesnt have much to do with my family but it does deal with pop culture and their im still talking about the cosby show and when the cosby show came out. A lot of middleclass black people embrace it as were finally on tv. Theres a brownstone in brooklyn heights. To parents or professionals and in many ways the first time we saw ourselves in that particular way on tv. Pop culture is very important to the main character, itshow he filters the world. So his relationship to the cosby show becomes a way of talking about the lie behind that kind of cosby show fiction. And of course now we know bill cosby, bill cosbys own life has underscored the separation between the televisual reality and how they actually are in theworld. So whether hes talking about the cosby show or road warrior. Or hiphop, pop culture becomes a way of filtering out the world and dealing with his own emotions. And actually like i said i had to exaggerate to make the story interesting , that section has nothing to do with my family was a proud family of zombie movie watching folks. Did jet magazine really was in whenever black people weregoing to be on tv . Sure. In the 60s, 70s. Diane carol was going to be on the tonight show so jet magazine would have a runup of a listing of any black person on tv. It was so rare and solovely. That the black press would tell you when you were going to be on tv. Host we talked for an hour Colson Whitehead and we had a lot of people. Been kicking me off. Were getting america involved here. Were going to get your phone call from charles in albuquerque new mexico area thanks for your patience youre on with author Colson Whitehead. First of all you dont have to thank me for my patients, i think its been wonderful. I enjoyed listening to the show. Not only your insightful questions but colson opening up and letting us have a little birdseye view into that magnificence rain of his and his Creative Process area i have the blessing of meeting with the person who won the National Book award for poetry and he always talks to me about having to find the harvest time. Sometimes theres days you have to get up and theres drudgery and youre stuck and knowing how this character develops and does this character have a life of its own, do you want to craft it towards a certain way and colson is talking about also making sure that you maintain the movement of the book forward and the linear structure and things of that nature and also the beauty and difficulties in opening yourself up as well because when you do a historical novel , the fact that you have to take some creative license with what youre doing though that does help in terms of the Story Development still, being true to what the story is. And my question has to do then with theres been so much that colson talked about that it was just amazing and interesting and the Story Development, hes talking about these cats, he has this idea and this plot and the structure and background and are there certain times when you get bogged down and not know exactly where to go with where he wanted to take something but he persevered he said sometimes you got to write those pages down. So my friend had said about persevering in the face of sometimes when you have this daunting task ahead of you and in the overwhelming and maybe just cranking out those few pages a day. And if you could talk about. Caller lets see what he has to say five work. And some days youre definitely in tune with the project and everything coming together and then some days are struggling. And you can do one paragraph a day. Thats a victory. A novel is a marathon. If i get a page is that sort of keeps me sane and some days i wake up and dont stop working or if im feeling at all improvised of course thats worked at takes the same part of the brain that you are making progress toward the end of the book. Was good to have a sense of detachment from your characters . Have you forgotten mad at one of your characters . Guest not mad. Its sort of the minstrel shows seen and i remember getting very angry. In sag harbor i was a little more removed from my previous characters for sag harbor in sag harbor is very personal. I felt very raw writing it a lot and then talking about slavery and the underground railroad in my new book which deals with institutional racism and more heard that aspects of america i do get angry when i researched. So when im writing it similarly i am, its an act of creation and its not an act of grief and its not an essay. I put things together so the reader can come to the story. Host you have the character and the underground railroad homer. Guest i had the idea for the book and ears ago and i think i waited until i was ready to write it and i think 10 years ago i would have over explained my psychology but my rule for homer was homer is going to homer and let them do what he wants so he is the black assistance in to the white sure. Hes a and hes been set free by ridgeway and he keeps hanging out with ridgeway and works with him. I try to eliminate the corners of the relationship. They were who upon being freed at the end of the civil war stayed with their master and did nothing else except the plantation and you cant really conceive of an iconic psychology that happen happened for there were masters maybe raised by a house and who swear that betsy is part of the family and i love betsy rich erase me from like a pop but of course you torture rape abuse that stand her family and her children and have that psychotic denial as the master. Ridgeway and homer make a duo and hopefully in a different episode they do illuminate for us kind of very odd dynamic of the master and the. Host martin near a pennsylvania good afternoon you are on with Colton Whitehead. Caller thank you and good afternoon mr. Whitehead. Quick question have you ever considered writing drama for media or cinema . Guest thank you. Yeah i mean i went to harvard for undergrad and a very conservative department and made one class like American Fiction after 1945 basically. I did study drama and they took classes in the africanamerican studies department in the Drama Department created i thank dialogue and the structure is very important to my work. And times when i viewed money i thought maybe if i write a screenplay i can just hang out in my house and get rest and shower. On the screenplay i get 30 pages in im like this. I know how to write a novel and so i end up going back to fiction but i grew up on tv and film in those mediums are very important to me. Ive got a lot of ideas from stone from Science Fiction and so i was a tv critic for a wild but i can do fiction and nonfiction but i dont really have the chops to leave those to genres. Host is mike bonin materialized . The guest usually might looks have too many black people to be adapted to film but this book has been embraced and when it came out in hollywood and various people looked at it we got a call from a Young Filmmaker and he had great ideas and it was Barry Jenkins who did moonlight. Moonlight hadnt come out yet but we saw an early version of it so i had to interview him to see if he was right for the job and worked with him. Were there any movies that defined inspiration and he was like movies . Are and about that but i was thinking Thomas Andersons there will be blood in the master and i was like not the right answer. And then weirdly he thought the contract came a week later so he was checking around with the fiction folks and Amazon Studios and the miniatures of it to writing it now and we will see if will see if it goes forward a pretty exciting. Host dean in monmouth junction, is that new jersey dean . I cant see it on my screen. Caller six miles north of princeton. You were kind enough to arbigrast my copy of the underground railroad at the Schomburg Center i think it was last year and i know that you and kevin young, hes a year ahead of you prevent your classmates. Guest yeah kevin young the poet nonfiction writer. Was good teen its hard to end direct with the delay their new york. Go ahead. Guest we started writing together and we knew each other as young writers in college. He was more professional and i was like the more slacker one. He always sort of knew what he was doing and right out of college had his first book of published and hes the head of the schomburg library, the africanamerican library in new york city. Company owner of and the writer of bonk about hoaxes in american the american way of conning the public. We have always. Working hes always been a very good leader and was very supportive and hopefully its great to see him to have such a great year. Host the richard from carol stream illinois, please go ahead. Caller hi mr. Whitehead i wanted to know how did they come up with the underground railroad and how were they built them are the homes . Social network. In the 1840s the locomotive is transforming america and so theres a who ran away from his master and the master woke up the next day and he said to himself there is no trace of him. Its as if he disappeared on an underground railroad and nothing came to terms with this Human Network that would help the escape to the north and it could be a person that is the seller and you are hiding someone for a couple of weeks until the coast is clear. Maybe you are taking someone and your wagon, taking them to the next city handing him off to somebody else. There were white people and black people risking themselves and risking their lives to help escape and so there were eastern seaboard routes and western routes that would end up in indiana massachusetts new york. Obviously its not a literal train. When the book came out three people who have gone for decades thinking it was a train which is impractical and proud to call. A 2000mile, from new york was very impractical. Host is their significance and the fact that the different underground stations somewhere decorated were very utilitarian . Theres a new york station with a white subway tile. Some are very grand and some are accommodating with visitors coming through. They are different characters characters at the train stations. Husfelt bob in eastern pennsylvania mails and you have referred to your couch more than once. Is that where you write and what is the tip of the day of writing a white . As good typical day of writing i get up and take my son to school, come back home and i start working and write a page about 10 30. Write another page have a snack and again when the three pages a day is a really good day. Im the kind of person who if i have but doctors appointment at 1 00 the whole day is shot and do Something Else. A pages a week typical of a working day 10 30 to 3 00. My hobby is cooking so round 3 30 i figure what to make for the family and when you cook for a couple of hours you have a sense of completion and you write a novel for two years. Its the sense of accomplishment you get from thinking of raised short ribs and to get the satisfaction of sharing with people and not waiting 24 months. Host lets go back to the crying j. A. G. Guest i find joking about the Creative Process some people go to cafes to work. I would rather be able to make a ham sandwich take a nap and you cant really take a nap in a cafe. Host its an indoor cafe. Guest there are so many, whats the word, people out there. [laughter] i stay in my little hug and keep locust and work. Host with your notoriety now it is of the underground railroad can you still be anonymous . Guest ive been writing the book for many years and the Small Community i have done more tv than usual and more magazine stuff. Its sort of uncomfortable. Is my fly open . Im like oh they just recognize me. People say im teaching a book i write a book and give it to my mother. I could be on some sort of maybe a taxicab or something or something terrible to ruin my mood and those nights when he you need someone who has taken the time to read the book and i have a kind word that brings you back to. Host in 2002 you are invited to the laura bush symposium on harlem renaissance writers at the white house and maria fonda whose the Washington Post book editor at the time asked you the question how you felt about africanamerican sections in the book store and you kind of didnt really give an answer and i was wondering if you have a more definitive answer about that. Guest sure yeah you know i think i had a longstanding policy of having the africanamerican books section and tony maurice and would be in the africanamerican section. Ideally you are in both. When i was in high school i would go to the black section and go to the bookstore and i would browse and youd find a random person need never heard about. Frederick douglass, who is this guy and it was a place to find books about your culture and i think it came out of a good idea in the 70s, black studies but why do you have Toni Morrison the black studies section . She should be in both and i think nowadays she is and book sections in my books are in book sections and its not as vague. Its a segregation that had a purpose and that was its purpose host of the next call for Colton Whitehead comes from tina. Hi tina you are in booktv. Caller thank you sir. I would just like to tell this gentleman i was raised in the suburb of philadelphia. We were never, never taught that there is a variable with blacks and i just apologize to you that this is what you have experience so sir, thank you for your work. Its wonderful and i appreciate all that you have gone through great thank you. Guest thanks tina and im glad that you grew up in a very regressive family i would say outside of philadelphia. Of course a lot of the country isnt as lovely and has a terrible side and a lot of sort of terrible part to their human character and ends up determining so much of our history but thanks for reading. Host you grew up middleclass uppermiddleclass in new york city or did you go through a lot of . Guest well its called based on the color of your skin not your zip code so of course like most young black men ive been stopped by the police handcuffed and interrogated for being in the wrong block at the wrong time in manhattan pulled over. One of two black eyes in the neighborhood in this nice car and you never know when that kind of episode will turn into something lethal. Black lives matter and what happened and ferguson played into the conversation and you have those conversations and then we stop and then rodney king and we talked about for two years and we stop talking about and we talked about again it again and then stop talking about it. Whether theres this National Conversation about it part of my existence ever since i became seen as a target. Host were you given a talk . Guest the talk, sure. The first one given to me was by Richard Pryor. He talked about being stalked by the police and he was like you know a white cop will shoot you in the second and when you show him your license and registration the dashboard richard friars zip code, i am reaching into my glove the first one who gave me the talk was Richard Pryor and my dad later many times. I was made aware that im a target and i could be shot any moment basically. Host from our facebook age, peg writes this my question did you always write such short or brilliantly descriptive sentences . The yesterday i quoted you on my Facebook Page as an example of your skill quote he proceeded in a series of life. The blaze to bar the next accounts on the sender grow. Did you write then . Did you hone it down to the core or was that your original sentence . You know thanks so much and thats very nice of you to say. Definitely there is a narrator and John Henry Days and a narrator in each witness which is more encyclopedic and has a different sort of much more complicated sentences than the narrator of this book and so you pick the right theater for the job and sometimes an encyclopedic narrative is great. Im in a mode with the underground railroad the book im working on now and i feel thats from trying different kinds of voices and trying different sounds and styles narrative styles. You exhaust one and move onto the next try to invigorate what you have done before and like i was saying before hopefully you get better at it and you keep going. Lets go you have mentioned this new book coming up are you going to tell us anything about it . Guest its too early. I want to jinx it but it takes place aboard in the early 60s. Usually i go to a darker book and underground railroad has the smallest content. Page that ive done. Two jokes and a couple pages but this book is also darker and maybe i should just mix about by doing two dark looks and around the next one could be lighter. Host lets hear from ed in keough, iowa. Hi ed ray at guest can i call u. Coulton or do you want to be called mr. Whitehead . Guest coulton is good. Colton is fine. Caller i didnt know it was life. I am 73 and ive had books in my head for years since ive been in my 20s and ive had people tell me gosh you know how it is to get busy trying to make a life and see your family and you get distracted but little stories and one of them my mother she passed away last year at 92 and i was told her i was going to write about her because she had a powerful impact on me like her father had an impact on her. The title i was going to have the mother, dont you come a mom calm meal fit and that was the only thing i remembered calling her because my dad, he always called her and make name that he would come up with. I had older ladies that took me to church in the neighborhood and thats horrible. Why dont you call her mother . Every time i did she would say you are pulling away from me. Move closer to me when you call me that. I thought maybe i was adopted you know. But i looked look too much my greatgrandmother. Host you are 73 years old and you live in iowa. Guest if you liked it by another one. I think they teach undergraduates and they teach different grad schools and ive forked at summer workshops where its all ages and people are in their 60s and 70s in writing their first novel or biographical story they have been carrying around and they finally have the time to go to it. This is my eighth book and i still struggle with when do i have time to work . The having a family, having a job where you find those hours to get your story down and thats always a struggle whether you are a oak Center Starting your first story but no one is going to write it for you. Only you know who old he is and who she is and what she meant to you. Only you can tell that story so the sooner you start the center will be done. Host whats the biggest mistake firsttime writers may . Guest i realized to my 20s that i had a lot of pothead friends. Stop the fighting and get to page 100. You get to the end and then fixx it. Dont get caught on making the first page perfect, perfect, perfect. Keep doing and replies, forward ribeyes but dont get stuck because the end will tell you whats wrong with the beginning. Host neville in cleveland, good afternoon. Caller i have two questions for mr. Whitehead. The first one is when you are writing who is your target audience and my second question is is there any subject that is offlimits that you wouldnt write about . Guest okay thanks, thats a good question. But with the intuitionist i had my ideal audience member was a 16yearold black kid who would read the book and say oh i could write rate im aware to the skype colson is a weirdo. I think meeting the invisible man at an early age, this is a kooky dude. Then the book came out and theres no 16 okay then the audience white or black and i stopped expecting for my audiences. Im gaining people and losing people. Sag harbor realistic and my elevator inspector book id had leadership and i followed up with a book about zombies so im getting the reader and disappointing them and move on into my next book that i dont pick about my audience anymore. Taboo subject i dont know much about foot wall so its unlikely that i will have my football novel but i think as a matter of distaste and not taboo prevent every thought i would write a book about poker but i think as you go through life Different Things become more adjusting to you so theres no way could have predicted i would have written a lot of my books. Host the next call for Colson Whitehead is david from allentown georgia. David good afternoon you are on the air. Caller oh hi rick i was going to ask i havent read any of your books about the african. Because ive read the autobiography of henry m. Stanley and he described where the arab traders came down to east africa especially and murdered the villagers to get 5000. Of course there are buyers in the new world and america like the drug dealers now. People supply the drugs or so id like you to comment on that. Guest i have a reflection on the african. When i open the book and before you get to american slavery thats for another subject but where there is money people tend, theres money involved people tend to explore their worst impulses so theres a lot of money in the african. And money now. There are stories about slavery now whether its maybe building iphones in a factory or shrimp on a shrimping vote. Slavery comes in different forms in different forms and enforcement money makes people do terrible things. Host liz is in long branch new jersey. Please go ahead for your question or comment for Colton Whitehead. Host the look the intuitionist the interpretations are over the place they could expand especially that the main or the elevator inspector . Sure, the intuitionist. Its much more ambiguous than my other books which sometimes have an ambiguous ending and sometimes not. What does intuition mean it means in the form of elevator inspectors something in terms of technology and i didnt think about it but with elevators you cant have the modern city before allies showed us invented the safety elevator. The elevator becomes a enables modernity and enables the modern city. So thats one meaning of elevator. I was writing a book and the phrase up with the race occurred to me that i was writing a location and sometimes intuitionism is about transcendence and achieving a Higher Consciousness or a higher level of being. The metaphor of intuitionism is very open so its open to a lot of interpretation and once im done with the book it is yours for you to read and interpret, ignore and whatever reading you have have fun with it. Thanks for picking it up. Host whenever youre of the book it is yours. Our conversation was Colton Whitehead continues but if you want to make a phonecall or have a comment or question hearsay get through 202748200 if you live in Eastern Central timezones 202 7488201 or those of you in the mountain pacific timezones and we have several ways via social media to make a comment or ask a question. Twitter Facebook Instagram remember look tv. Email booktv at cspan. Org and well continue our conversation in just a minute. We want to show you Colton Whiteheads acceptance speech at the National Book awards in late november of 2016 right after the election. We are also going to show you some of his favorite books and influences and some of the books he is reading now. C the last four months the book came out its been so incredible today i was like is this like the make a Wish Foundation . The my dying or something everybody is being nice to me. I only get it. Its so confusing that i guess my motto for acceptance speeches is the oscars the first one i saw was 77 were star wars was put against any hall and i was really crushed. I never thought that i would become a writer and actually be at one of these things so its all really a neat. For 18 years i was going to say who gets to stay the same Publishing House for 18 years and Robert Callan ruins this whole thing. [laughter] well done, sir. [laughter] my daughter maddie is at home watching on the screen yet if shooting go to bed. Maddie you are 12 years old are they really started living the day you were born. Banks so much for your ongoing gift. Itsed my life. [applause] beckett is three. I dont know who you are yet. Im really excited to find out. [laughter] but it is so much fun y. Chang with you and you have all these ideas about things. Im excited to see you develop and then my book is dedicated to my wifean julie. [applause] its okay writing good looks when you are unhappy. Its Better Writing better books when you are happy so thank you, love. [applause] so again we hate her from all magazine and Oprah Winfrey of Oprah Winfrey fame. Got the word out and usually people. Myut copy and i dont know and then the uber is like be it and its all crazy. So this time last year is finishing up the book and 19 pages to go, dont mess it up cold sin. You never know whats going to happen in a year and now the book is out and i would never think id be standing here. I do know where it be a year from now. We are outside of the blasted hellhole wasteland of trump land which the europe inhabits but who knows if its going to happen a year from now. Because im still promoting the book people like to have any words about the election . The not really, im sort of stunned and something that was making me feel better and i guess it was a think hopefully other folks he kind everybody, make art and fight the power. Thats my biggest formula for me anyway. [applause] host Colton Whitehead in your speech you referred to the terror that is trump land. That was just a couple of weeks after the election. Guess who it was, i mean i was in new york and as a teenager theres this tabloid. I watched the apprentice the reality show and then he was so repellent in terms of during the Campaign Campaign season with his racist and xenophobic speeches rhetoric that it was startling. Having written a book about White Supremacy to have a white supremacist in the white house again. Host do you consider them to be a white supremacist . Guest he says a lot of racist things and governance in a way that benefits whites to the detriment of people of color consistently and over time. That seems white supremacist to me and if you say that White Supremacists are marching in charlottesville and raising and confederate flags and call them very nice people its evident of a certain sympathy. Host Isabel Wilkerson one of the books that inspired you. Guest yeah it captures the story of millions of people who move to the north and the early part of the 20th century. Thats how my family and it up in new jersey and new york did my dads family came from florida when out of town supposedly. His father got into a fight and supposedly that classic story you hear from families. My mothers family is from virginia. People got to newark and heard the word newark or four was new york and got off the train and ended up in new jersey. They thought they were in new yorks penn station. Its so much black america escaping jim crow and thats how i became a new yorker. Host i think at some point you wrote that at your mothers family were free blacks. She dissented from a biracial woman named sally who came over and 17 something. She was half white irish, half lack came over as an indentured servant and worked on James Madisons farm plantation and those kids were free and married and then my fathers line was his mothers from barbados which is a sugar Plantation Island and the American South georgia and florida. Host does Ralph Ellisons invisible man holed up . Guest eight years ago i taught it and its a really marvelous book. Im going to say a few words in the sermon. I mentioned a revelation for me as a teenager and airy meeting the first section the Battle Royale was excerpted in my seventh. Primer of american short stories and at that point i was reading fantastic literature and theres so much absurdity in the opening scene i felt a kinship and so it was important to me when i was younger and that real sort of inspiration. Host what you get from guest this ecstatic american voice that is tragic, sarcastic love being cruel and on twitter if someone has an account we retweets lines from howell on the infinite loop but ill be watching the news and im angry watching the news on twitter entry lines pop up. New york which is a series of impressionistic essays about the city. The american voice of ginsburg and walt whitman. Host from the underground railroad Kristin Whitehead writes scepter rise to thread connecting all human endeavors if you can keep it its yours. Guest people or objects and they had a value placed on their lives and the more they worked the more they made money for the people along them and so the story about capitalism makes america into a global player. And so you have imperialism and you have capitalism. You have manifest destiny and so the book i tried to russell with those major forces that have shaped our country. Host the next call for Colton Whitehead comes from bill in new york. Bill you are on booktv. Go ahead. Are you with us as a reminder turn down your phone when you get on their otherwise theres a delay and it gets a little bit confusing. Lets hear from ken in spartanburg South Carolina. We are listening. Caller hi mr. Whitehead. Id like to say im enjoying the program. My question is then answer but i wanted to know who was one of your favorite authors and what type of inspiration did you get from that author and when did you know that writing was going to be your lifetime duty instead of going out and getting as they say her real job, a 9 to 5 job. Host we are going to get an answer to that in just a minute but whos the writer that inspired you and which of mr. Whiteheads books have you read . Caller Toni Morrison has been one of my most inspirational writers and i had, im reading mr. Whiteheads book now. Host the underground railroad . Caller the underground railroad yeah. Im presently reading it now and im enjoying every minute of it so this is a treat to see you on tv today so thank you. Host ken would he do in spartanburg North Carolina . s caller im actually, i work for the hospital here. Im a nurse. I like to read. Guest can thanks for reading and i hope the end of the book is not disappointing. [laughter] im glad youre enjoying the first half of the book. Different writers have inspired me in so may different folks. You get something from Raymond Carver the writer of realistic short stories and ralph ellison. Early implements this the Twilight Zone and Marvel Comics and steven king and when i was in college i wanted to write horror and the black shiny feet took a knee steven king title and put lack in front of it was basically what i wanted to do. Then i started reading marquez and beckett did these are people who were playing with the fantasticks like a genre or sciencefiction writer. For my early love for genre is the fantasy is a tool. What does the term magical realism mean to you . Guest what is does it mean to me . It means that the rail and a fake are both are presented in the same register. Marquez came up with it and its one of those eager prep fishers and he came up with it from listening to his grandmother would tell stories about her village when she was growing up mixing in a fantastic detail and the share of sprouted wings and will weigh in she presented it with a brick face. He never knew because of her brick face what was real and what was unreal and if you read his work rather him magical realist who are in an unrecognizable world and we veer off and we come back in his matteroffact merging of the two and when i was working on this book the underground railroad for many years it was more sciencefiction and it was very different in terms of time and had a much more fantastic flourish. I thought instead of having the fantasy cranked up to a final chapter in 11 i headed ill down to a magical realism. Cora ann counters these absurd moments and is presented with a rick face and matteroffact town and i take it serves the book. Host what did you study at harvard . Guest i was an english major. Again it was a very conservative parchment so i had to take africanamerican studies classes to sort of line myself up with were as interested in but i went back in 2000 when i was teaching intuition thats when i was writing the intuitionist. Its 21st century so now im officially old so anyway. Host the college apex come any connection to harvard . Guest its a really wants the name. I remember going there and there was and what kind of name is that for the wigglesworth family it seems like whatever it takes to get your name in a harvard dorm you have to be incredibly waspy so i cant think of anything for harvard. Host someone he teaches regularly whats your take on the First Amendment discussion being held on College Campuses . Guest College Students are supposed to be annoying. Its better to be annoying for four years than being out here with us and be annoying so for a lot of people they are first learning about cultures or other races are getting into bubbles of the smalltown. You are doing things for the first time and it makes you engaged and learning things and you can be really kind of annoying. Again better to be annoying for four years and out here with us. [laughter] i was teaching for a while after that. Host jonah in an email says to you get mentioned depression being said at times get your sense of humor comes through in this interview. How does humor seep into your book . Guest its part of life and i mentioned Richard Pryor earlier George Carlin and they are comedians i saw when i was very young. They are making fun of the world presenting the world in all sincerity and all filter. And it has this narrative voice that goes from the tragic to the ecstatic specific to the universal was trying to capture the notebook. Its part of my personality and the books are darker and i think it is for everybody. Host is that in your outline im going to do this first and then its going to be outrageous and then we are going to go said here in third person. Its about specific . Guest of the will be satirical and with the underground railroad the treatment of slavery was going to be so brutal and it was not going to be distance would not serve the story. I sort of knew it going in and im not totally aware of it until the first couple of pages. Oh this is how im going to tell the story. Host lets hear from glory and caliper to present tehachapi california gloria . Caller that is correct. I have two questions. One is his colson the family name and secondly there were a couple of ways that people communicated to each other about the underground railroad. One was forced through song or spirituals and were there any other ways that they communicated to each other . Host thank you maam. Guest the first part of the question. Host is cold and the family name . Guest coulton is a family name. My father was named archibald said he hated archibald. He was named the arch and coulton is my middle name. My grandfather is named colson and his father or grandfather worked in the hotel and virginiana smalltown may be lynchburg. Bought himself out of freedom. He works in a hotel and would hire himself on a weekend and thats how we got free and then he brought his daughter out of slavery. So coulton goes back to that individual who got out of slavery by paying off his owners feed. Through communication among underground railroad folks you know if you are caught you would be put to death and it was very clandestine and working in comp again whispered in my book she comes from george and in reality the underground railroad didnt operate that force out. You would never make it to the carolinas, virginia so it was a North Carolina virginia type of thing pretty good escape south or the caribbean, to mexico if you are enslaved that far south. But there were so many ways people communicated and again if you are caught you could be jailed or beaten to death. Host marshall, houston, good afternoon. Caller good afternoon and i thank you. Thank you both for the this but i love booktv. Two questions. Do you need to come from an nsa pro can to find an agent and two if you write different genres how do you settle on an agent or how does an agent settle on you . Guest thanks and good luck with your writing. I am not in an essay but half of my friends who write did go to grad school for writing and have the men didnt. For me my apprenticeship was looking out the newspaper but i worked at the Village Voice and thats how i learned to sit down for five hours and write out a piece. If i did and i wouldnt get. And i couldnt pay my rent that i learned how to collaborate with editors and so my first agent who dumped me was with the newspaper so i had nonfiction writers as agents and some i knew. When i had to find the agents agents who have been with them for 20 years, i got a recommendation from someone who passed on my first book and i asked her im writing this crazy book about elevators. Who do you think would be open to that and she recommended that cole who is a new agent at that point and she represented juno diaz and so from her list she had a sensibility that they could do a lot with mine. You find, you can google it now but you have a mouth or who you like her rights in the same mode as you and find out who their agents is. In my case i wrote a twopage paragraph and a twopage description of the book that was not offputting and so thats how i found my agent. You figure out who is representing books are like yours. Host the underground railroad has been a bit of a phenomenon. Youve been talking about it and working on it and talking about it for two years and working on it for x number of years. Are you getting tired . s guest i mean you know im not bored or tired creative its really an incredible you know four years of writing it and coming out and somehow i could something i could never have dreamed of in the reception in terms of people that acted up and endorsed it, Pulitzer Prize. Its so wild and its a onceinalifetime thing. I am enjoying it and appreciating it. Host how did you find out that you won a pulitzer . Guest actually finding out is not in the cao pic but its a live stream from columbia and its really fast. And the pulitzer goes to so its not really theatrical. Its really quick and its through livestream. My wife went to work and i was like can you watch at me and she came to the tv. Then they said my name and we started dancing and had a little dance party. I met up with some friends who were in town and my editor and my agent and we celebrated. Host what was your friends reaction to macarthur genius . Guest will you know i had written two books. Host the sudden the check arrives in the mail. Guest a check arrives in the mail. People ask is it a burden you know, expectations. You dont have to hand something in at the end of five years and the way i took it was that id written two books on paul premises. Keep doing that to we will give you money to support you to keep doing that so i took it as just encouraged him and. I wasnt anxious about it. There was pressure to live up to. Youre doing exactly what he should be doing and keep doing it. Host lets hear from john in flushing ohio. You were on with author and novelist Colson Whitehead. Caller thank you very much and the praise he received from the Rolling Stone and the Washington Post and the miami herald you deserve it. You are stepping in high id like for you to give a short overview of sag harbor because you and i come from newark, new jersey and im a curator for the underground railroad here in my town so go right ahead and tell us what you can. Host john was their station in flushing, ohio . Guest caller there certainly was for the ohio indiana governor in wisconsin right up the ohio river and what coulton has said is up to date host the thank you sir. Guest thanks for watching john. Sag harbor i talk a little bit about a four. Its a very important book for me because its that moment i started with intellectual questions. I was trying to explore and that was the premise of the novel. John henry, what if i updated this Industrial Age for the Information Age and what stories would it generate from bad in that it seems i had been avoiding writing from drawing from personal material that it seems for books and for novels then it was time to. The book was important to me as a writer and gave me access to different parts of my personality and put it out there. Ive had a bit of an emphasis a program work into my characters. I think in sag harbor. And what i wrote the combination of two stages in my work. There is a character grabbing it and ive been learning it from sag harbor and the other books two. In this darkness art sort of abstract premise what if i made the underground railroad really real. In the character work really come together. It hasnt ported for me as a writer and as a person. I think influence in this work. Host delaware. Hi angelo. Guest how you doing today. Im here in the state of delaware. I am amazed at how the gentleman writing this book, i have just now caught in his books. The underground railroad. I just got reading muscle is rusted. By another author. You are definitely thinking youre a fan. Youve got a sense of humor. Youre doing it. By meeting an author. Im learning something off of you. The last name of yours. How can i sent prayed is that like a slave last name. Was it given to you. Life father also is from barbados and hes from virginia but his father was from barbados. My family had a hard. It so enlighten me, how did you keep that sense of humor. Colson yes picking up the name whitehead. Its not for my barbados side. The name is clark. The clark family comes from new york. Those in 1920. And in talking about the book, the history of virginia. And someone sent me a genealogy that they did for me. Putting together clues and things that i talked about. So whitehead, is person, traced back to florida before the georgia in the mid 19th century. So before that i am not sure. Another a lot of white people named whitehead. Without the slave masters name name, i am not sure. In terms of other work. I think your writings, got better by doing it. In the next one can only be better. If anyone saw so successful that it will be better. And you learn from that. I keep a since of humor about my work. And i just try to keep going and keep Getting Better. Host maria from el paso, texas. Guest hello. Thank you. I have a question. How much should i accept is a Nonfiction Book as factual. Is that a writers bias in there. Can i rely on the facts from a Nonfiction Book. Host do have a specific book maria that you are referring to. Guest just in general. I like history, autobiography. , and i except fiction just assigned novel. They may have some historical facts in there. But it may not be. Ill give you an example. Lets eight bill oreilly book. On the pacific war. The son of something. The sunrises or something. How actual is bill oreilly book. Colson thank you man. I dont read a lot of bill oreilly read but i think, i grew up in the 80s. In the age, there is no objective truth. In the perspective and the biases, the social conditioning. It affects on how you tell a story. If youre a history now. But catholic interpretation is possible. A feminist interpretation as possible. It using all of these things were different sing a cultural point of view in terms of how a story told. Writing a memoir is subjective. Its an account on how useful things. In your mom and cousin may disagree. So how that nonfiction together writing the fictions can make it up. In terms of the underground railroad, by the people who have nonfiction there saying arent you sing in trouble by missing the real and the fake in the age of fake news. Dont you have a responsibility to your reader. Answer is no. I dont have a response ability to the reader. [laughter]. I assume that when the book says the underground railroad, a novel, piece of fiction. You should not be taken as gospel of how it actually happened. Another we lose people die every year when they get mixed up into tornadoes. Thinking that will take them to the wizard of oz. Thats an error. You can take it seriously. I for one refuse to go to costa rica. Im definitely afraid of dinosaurs addressing part and do not want to get eaten. But for most people i think another problem. They can differentiate between fiction and nonfiction. And i am joking about being in my dinosaur. Host i just want to check on that for it is their significance in the John Henry Days. The protagonist justin a southern for same. Colson about peoples names, are starting to take this is folklore. And try to find different avatars. Its a blues of singers in the 30s. And he is another sort of avatar. Ill leave it at that. [laughter]. I will just limited thats. Host and things that you said to the last caller. That you do not fill responsibility to the reader. Colson noel, to tell the story. I dont feel responsible to educate them about history. I think whats been nice about the experiments, they didnt happen the 50s, happened in the 30s and 40s and beyond. And for people, immigrants and people of color, they didnt happen really in 1850, happened later. And people in our history or if they have, theyve been moved to do more research i think that is great. Other responsibility, hopefully not to bore people to much. And my book would be worth their while. And im responsible to my family and friends. To be a good husband and a good father and a good friend. Besides that, if you think that avatars in the book sounds compelling, get up. And he does not sound compelling, dont pick it up. Host next caller for our author. We are missing. Suzanneguest i called to give a message. Im not even able to see low enough to read much anymore. But he was talking about the way the black people that things that used to get out, the quilting read it would quilt patterns and hang them on the clotheslines. That was used in the deep south. Im in an elderly white lady. Not very well educated but i read a lot of history. I have a lot of love in may 2. On people and ive always read a lot of books. A black and white. And god give me a lot of love in my heart. In the sky is real interesting to watch. But ive not read his books but that is something that he needs to know is i have a paper here, someone who shows the different patterns of i can find it again. As a quilt, when they would take them on the clotheslines. And maybe 50 miles or 100 miles. That would be another signal. They used that. Host before we let you go, tell us a little bit about yourself. And if youre raised in tennessee and what tennessee was like over the years. Guest i was raised in tennessee but i lived in georgia for about four years in different parts. That is when i realized the part of tennessee that i was raised in in the mountains we do not have that prejudiced but the part of georgia animate some real sweet black people. Never forgotten. And i couldnt believe things that are seen. I just couldnt believe it. The sit on the front porch was say the market may be. I know we cant do that they would say. That was like 50 or 60 years ago. It is a painful thing. If another quilting and other stuff, she said that they know about the singing. For the quilting was used in the deep south. Certain quilts. Host thank you man. Colson thank you for tuning in. It and he said you dont read much of the audiobook are very well done. I did not do the audiobook but i can read, do if i practice them. And i read the audiobook, its really exhausting. The kind of trim from the goes into it, like the real dramatic trauma. Professional actors do it. And i know people like the versions. Like for example the underground railroad right in their talk about tennessee versus georgia. That is very interesting. Since the book is come out, the conversation in different parts of the south. I remember when the book, people would say this is weird taking this book down to the south. That rarely happens well you know, we are slaves in new york as well. The likely to the south. North carolina is a bad rap in my book, the white supremacist state and exaggeration of the jim crow from the lynching times. Host so South Carolina and georgia. Colson im going of this week. To go down to greensboro. Been there five times and simulcast amount. Ive been embraced by colleges and vibration people come up to the events. They are so nice. Its a reckoning. He let a piece of property that was been in the family for generations. It nearby person in carolina and how do you reckon with the fact that the great great great grandfather, brutalized people. Thats what paid for the land and house are still in. As a black person. When i was researching is a story is a going up, had reckon with maybe i shouldnt be here. Select the mike great great great plan parents were on the start that plantation. So the book, no matter where youre coming from, i think its interesting to see the reactions when he came back out in france. People connected. With the French Resistance among other workers. When two people to safety. It has been interesting to see people from different cultures and Different Countries how they react read. Host do you enjoy the College Lecture circuit. Colson i do. Host give anxiety. Colson doing something, definitely want to know how its going to turn aspirated so for my new book, open spring and how people respond. I am two of the way through. For me it is helpful to sort of road tested. People are the laughing at the jokes, with a silent in the terrible parts. But also to get a good reaction. Its a crazy idea. It is working and people are understanding what youre trying to do. Host without delving too far into your character. If you didnt sign up for the College Lecture circuit, would you be essentially tethered to your couch. Or could you easily do that. Colson i do work at home. So i do spend a lot of time there and going to foreign travel for publication in Different Countries and going to North Carolina and going to tucson. That is way of not being such a hermit and also, i love new york. And the travel allows me to go to places that i wouldnt normally go. So its a really good and positive parts. Host president obama praised the underground railroad. Did you get a chance to meet him while he was in office. Colson i did. I got an email from one of his assistants. And actually was the white house. And so i went and he invited a bunch of novelists praye. Novel. He had been in the white house for almost eight years. It was a week before he was going to leave and he said he was wanting to chat with the writers. And have lunch with them. And then he only had a couple of days left. Time was running out. So being sort of a lefty writers, and for days we had heard in the news that trump was coming in. And we were talking about writing and he is in breach books. Got really animated talking about being a writer. Writing his first book. Second indonesian island. It sounded nice. The me in the huds. He got really animated just thinking about how that thrill of action. Which all of us can relate to. Host for you in when you were writing your first book. Colson in brooklyn. Im really fond in his early days, was really broke. Writing an article the voice, by me three days of work. Then i would write another article and it would buy me a couple more days and livein rooms. It was just totally like messed up. About writing. This really troubled apartments. But what you do when youre that age. Host in honolulu, good afternoon to you. Guest it is so nice to be and they are with you. Thank you cspan. I would like to know if youre familiar with the writings of an italian. Covino. He wrote in the 60s, most famous work is the cosmic comics. It is not really a novel, each chapter is like the short stories unto itself. When i hear you left, i thought maybe you would like the humor of the cosmic comics. He also wrote i know how exactly english, the baron and the trees or Something Like that. Italian. Anyway. Host why is this appealing to you. Guest is a magical realism thing. He came a little bit earlier. But not much. About the same time. He was very light and his language is just beautiful. So intriguing, his met imagination. The familiar author. Colson yes hes great. And he wrote a couple of other great books. When i encountered his work in college, from kind of like a fantasy. He was kind of an eyebrow writer who is using the tools of the storytellers that i adored growing up. That fantasy dial is a realistic one. Or clarks, 11. Im definitely kind of that kind of voice. His fantastic voice is really inspirational. In the books are short prayed pick them up. Host are you reading mr. Miracle. Colson yes mr. Miracle. What is writing sag harbor, sometimes you research coming go to plantations and with sag harbor, this is like maybe about pop culture. It is recreated some of my things from the 80s. Comics as well. So not up on all of the stuff that is coming up nowadays. But mr. Miracle is getting a lot of great reviews. So i downloaded it. Its about sort of small corner of the dc comics world. This writer kenyas have a very sort of postmodern 20th century, cant encounter from the 70s. Pick him up. Host david, tulsa. You are on book tv. Guest thank you for taking my call. To preface my comment. One of the most interesting summers that i spent as a teacher was, in 2003 as a Teaching Fellow for cspan. And as mr. Whitehead probably knows, it is very difficult to encourage students to read. And to get them to read. He sent a message to my students from the benefits of reading books as opposed to some of their other activities. Colson im a writer because i love reading the note was a kid. And i read Science Fiction and comic books. But wanting to write stories about zombies and robots and werewolves. And maybe want to write serious fiction. So doesnt matter if its twilight, hunger games. If you like it, ritas. Note whether what people are going to say. If you like hunger games, their other books that takes on society they might also like from different writers. It could become a gateway to different kinds of fiction. Its a way that i would say that stephen king was a gateway to other books. Occasionally ill read are all be in the library and ill go to the website and Say Something nice about the libraries. Why do we need books. Why do we breathe and why do eat. [laughter]. Libraries and books are important. Host are you kids readers. Colson yes. The 40 old, not so much. He likes take a lego catalog. And that man, joker. Like that. Pages three seven. My four yearold. My daughter, graphic novels for like younger readers. It is a big part of her reading. Now shes living into overstuffed. Host next call is from new jersey, myrtle. Myrtle you on book tv. Guest i read every week on sunday. But mr. Whitehead, want to know if youre going to do any book reviews in the elisabeth norton are. Suet are not sure when that. But my website shows ryan touring in the spring. Perhaps im going to town near you. Your new jersey. I live in new york. How dare for book festival about a year and a half i was there. On a tuesday actually. Which is not too far. So maybe we will see them. If you do come, wave. Host do you do book. Colson i do. Host what is the most common, the people make to you. And what is the most offensive comments somebodys 19. Sue one offensive well, like those totally messed up. Definitely in new york different acquaintance or lack of appointments for africanamerican culture. In their basic questions in our work would make sense. Within questions like like couldve what person have written this book. It is about a culture authenticity. Do nebraska white person of a black person could write this book. Ten white people right outside of a race. And theres a big question now about authenticity. Spin framed in a way that has nothing to do with my book. Host these are questions that you get from interviewers. Colson yes. Host to get apologized a lot to colson there are people who removed to apologize for, like the southern culture. It like what their great great great great and fathers did not do or did not do. So thats a very small percentage. Does not bug me. The most common question is about why a female protagonist being inspired by Henry Jacobson exploring some of these plays. Basically, you take the time. The really happy that you have came out. And sort of answered and engaged. Host because of the underground railroad and because of your books, the been come in the africanamerican writer prayed. Colson people do want to talk about black lives matter. We had this booking that we or asked if i could talk. One is you have someone from black lives matter talk about black lives matters not some dumb novelist. And what is happening with White Supremacy and american now and race and racism. Things have changed since the 50s. And contemporary political culture and just naturally do a conversation about the book. Thing. It is not my job to be the fourthseeded talk show. I really am a writer. Host greg from missouri. Good afternoon. Guest good afternoon and thank you for a fascinating interview. Two quick questions. As mr. Whitehead, are you familiar with the slave findings of William Faulkner especially in the long short story, the bear. In his his stream of consciousness technique. In the novel good on moses. On the second question, what you think about the postmodern novel is like robert hoover, William Gaddis and others. Colson host what you think of g brady. Guest. Guest i think are fascin, but post modernist novel. And also about rosenberg, the executions of the 50s called the public burning. William gets from st. Louis to just passed away at age 88. Something. Fascinating novels. Interesting school of writing. Host tickets are. Colson sure the faulkner. I read. Unblinking on the other one. What i was in college. He didnt really stay with me. I dont think of him often is an influence. I dont have much use for him. I guess in terms of my work. And have it read him in a few years. Definitely remember reading the babysitter in the first year in college read postmodern collage. I was very important for me. His first writers that are red in class. So i continued setting up on them. , gaddis, its definitely spent time with recognition spring adjusted by time with 800 pages. Jr. I prefer jr, the sort of really distinctively american novels. It kaleidoscope dish interpretations of american culture. And into the public burning, Richard Nixon as a character of the rosenbergs. That kind of way of having your own spin. That was okay to do that spring i got from hoover and some of the works. Host from a profile up to be the guardian in 2017. His parents were with a recruitment firm. They were less than delighted when you became a writer. Host my father groveport. Firstgeneration college. Hope for us children that they would not be broke. And since i got out of college. And because of my career choice read so, for a long time, i was going to get a straight job and become a lawyer. And then intuition us or the the intuitionist came out, they sort of realize i was in it for the longhaul. Host this is your father and sag harbor can you read this you. Kept changing the channel out of habit. Senate and the nightly news. The faces on the screen, the new stickers, victims and all of the everyday heroes were parade of shifting masks. Props of an idea but the souvenirs of our friends and neighbors brought back to cross the atlantic. He called them out. He didnt need a teleprompter. He knew this commentary by heart. The televangelist stuck his head into the collection box. The problem of black people is a waste of time praying to god when they should be out looking for a job. Nobody ever gave me anything and i didnt ask for anything. Some people need to get off of their assess. Etc. Etc. Colson sure. It is a very conservative take in terms of pulling yourself up by your straps. He grew up and started his own company. Definitely in that last part. I think sadly, the first art of that, yelling at the tv news. It sounds like me. I become him. [laughter]. [laughter]. What i do. C5 have you thought about changing the channel. Sue and exactly. Even when i work i have to have like six months free. Blake became shut such a news junkie in the last spring. Then i started working on this notebook. And it helps. I got off of the tv news nipple so to speak. If c5 heavy remain sober. Colson exactly. I am back or something crazy is happening. But the stuff that is happening in america. Im sucked back in. Im really glad finish this book before her latest charming round of news. Not a lot of people writing, were like drooling idiots. Which revenues i was thinking did trump really say that. I really going to open up our national parks. Like what we can do. So slight same thing. Lee good liberal tradition. Now are living in such a dark time. So im glad i finished my book before i got sucked up into the new cycle. Host new york city. Guest thank you for taking my call. Two questions. One is what does mr. Whitehead think about that use of the unborn today. In the second one is if there is a difference in his mind between stereotyping and racism. Between any racist or ethnic backgrounds. Host what is your answer to those two questions. Guest while i live for the past 30 years as a white woman. And i certainly hear the and word lot. But government if i let us look, it would be a big wrong. So my personal opinion is that all the vocabulary should be available to all people. In the second one is that stereotyping is a gateway towards racism. Or it could be a mindset. But there is a difference. So effective somebody saying, my people have a great sense of rhythm. As a stereotyping or is that a dangerous stereotyping. Colsonhost what did you grow u. Guest originally from germany. And i immigrated 32 years ago to new york city. Host thank you man. Colson the differences between the stereotyping and racism, racism dependence on negative stereotypes. Of people of different skin. And stereotypes about gender. Xenophobia, about stereotyping about people from other cultures. And other, so not really smart enough to make. In terms of that and word, somebody was dealt with culture for many years, they have to this point in history, say who can use that word and you cant print is really daunting. Its just really tiring. If youre white person who wants to say that word, when you want to say it. Why is it an issue and why are you asking. And worry spending time why can i use that word. Obviously its used in different ways. And that the way that the board bench can be used by men and women in different ways. And it exhausting some lines brassy personality. Why would you ask six word n wo. Host wouldnt they flip out. Colson will then youre probably racist. [laughter]. Host this is marsha. How important we are teachers and impacting your current literary. Colson im often asked if there was a mentor who took a shine do you. The answer is no. No one ever really took assigned to me. For single me out for special treatment. And i think about teachers i had a think about mr. Johnson introducing me to, a teacher who was kind of racist but introduced me to under the solitude is a senior in high school. So you never really to me aside and said, your special. [laughter]. But i had great books in my development as a person in it as a writer. Its still think about some of the things i read in elementary school. And ones that teach us about 1950s america was sort of the jackson story. Introduced to this mobile. James joyce of infection in college. And then theres this explosive dynamic talent and governors lissy. They introduced me to very important books that are still around today. Host in michigan. A few minutes left in our program. Guest hi there. Im calling because i love your hairdo. This really cool. And peter read that caused by your father. And i think he mustve got to my high school. Because we all talk the same way. I live in a mixed area that we all got along. We got together, we left given we did not call each other names. And boy a lot of people who graduated with me of color arent of nonpolar, went on to really do great things. In fact two of the officers were graduating class are people of color. We didnt call each other names. Nobody called me a dirty jew and i didnt call anybody another name. Weak link to get on same neighborhoods got along great. And i think racism is really ugly nine dont like the groups that are getting together in government to fight each other. Think that is really sad. Host what you mean by the new racism. Guest you have all of these subgroups in our government that they get together in groups of five or six and call themselves one group or another it began before a microphone and fighting for a certain because when it should be one person and one bowsprit it speaking for their constituents, not for themselves prayed thats crazy. I wish they would get back to america. Host do a comment from her for her. Colson sadly, this manifestation of america darkness goes back centuries. I think when obama was elected, people were saying about the society. Dont know a lot of black folks that would say we would limit a certain society because that happened. I think obviously the people who were therefore obama, about 49 percent of obam did vote ford trump. When they are talking about hate crimes in the race, were talking about people marching with a neonazi flag. And conservative plank and ashamed to certify sit for another new bother to wear a kkk mask. When talking about the return of something for the emergence of something that is always been there. Well continue to be with us for a very long time. Unfortunately. Host what about the references to race and sag harbor. He couldve that been written by anybody. Colson is pope becoming a teenager. And into identity. To me is that about a black a kid. Savanna kind of identity formation that we all go through. Do i start where do i start in the community ends. Clear is that. Host what did they want to change the name. Colson apex is kind of a a town of the midwest. They wanted to rebrand themselves. They hired someone and who is the protagonist of the book. This kind of bandaid, that you have different skin tone so you can find your own skin color not to be ashamed that if you have dark skin, or flesh tone bandaid really is a branding. They wanted to change the name of the town because of the branding. The same way neonazis and White Supremacists are rebranding themselves. You want a new image. And projects a new identity for yourself. Start with the name. Host so what name are considered a should say. Colson . Host we will give away the ending. Colson then main character is faced with the emphasis of the town and the essence of American History. How can the meaning of the town capture where the going and where they have been forgive the duty to tell the truth. Hard to sell this new identity. Kenny comes to a, adventure and ims comes off of the solution. Not necessarily the teacher assigned. But its his solution to a towns problem. Host tennessee. Good on book tv. Guest hello. And you got my name correct. I wanted to ask a question. I think what i have been looking and listening to. It had some humor but what i would like to know is have you thought about writing something that is purely humorous even like a satire on some serious subject like slavery or lynching or civil rights. But jim crow possibly. Colson sure, i think John Henry Days deal with different moments about history. And i think i use it as a tool. In the right for this job are not operated or the story or not. So might best comic book is a noble hustle. I assume they had a lot of fun writing it. The first line is ive good poker face because im half dead inside. The kind of weird miserable humor or not. But i think that kind of sums up whats in that book. Host madison, wisconsin. Anita. Guest hi and thank you for taking my call. I am a big question. I am a librarian a retired one. But never quite retired. Although no, looks at you love that were important to you in middle school and high school. Colson solitude. As a High School Senior was really great. And i had cool english teacher who had a class on fabulous. Highfalutin. It is fantastic. And progress, that old british story about children going through adventures. An template for some of my books. And another selfcontained book about adventure. The odyssey, the kind of structure. And solitude, obviously an introduction. Earlier, i think stephen king. Meeting harry. That was a very interesting structure. And theres that story very, and her high school in her town. And then in the narrative, but the newspaper accounts of the carnage that harry unleashes. So it is foreshadowing but also attacks outside of the main part of being deserted. And remember seeing been thinking la can actually seventh grade phrasing of that review can structure it in that way. Back then, i remember thinking that by reading stephen kings books. Host did you ever have any trouble dooming your main characters. Colson that of course eight or nine or ten gold medals in the 70s olympics for swimming. Mark gets in my book, cannot swim. So i wanted the name mark spitz. [laughter]. Host barbara in virginia beach, virginia. Hi. Guest hi and thank you for taking my call. Such a fascinating interview. Im enjoying it so much. I would like to ask Colson Whitehead if he admires or likes the work of walter mosley, roger i very much enjoy. A writer who is versatile like himself in terms of genre. And also, assuming you can talk about legal black man in modern america. I think you for taking my call. Host thank you for calling in. Colson is a sinner layer, is trying to find the model for a book. Trying to be a better writer. I learned about structure. As reading a lot of detective books. Read james leroy. In mostly freedoms great couple months of my life. Setting up the conventions of suspense, how do you bring in politics. Had a bring in race. It is very fortunate when it was finished, the synod out to people for blurbs. Little endorsements on the back of the book. Walter mosley was very kind and gave me a few sentences. And i met him since then there is always great to see him. And when the book came out, people would say about your book because Walter Mosleys in the back and i love walter mosley. So it was really sweet that he would take the time. The good individual. Host he will be sitting in that chair in april during our special your fiction authors. He will be there in two months. It is time for this last call from nancy and georgia. Nancy, go ahead. Guest good afternoon. You are a real refreshing guest. When asked if you know the work of Charles Chestnut from the 1890s. He was an attorney, an africanamerican attorney in chicago who wrote the conger woman. I was an attorney but i wonder if you know about his fiction. Colson i do indeed. Is very conservative. Such a glut of classes in africanamerican and archer. In this way first came across like matters. And Charles Chestnut. A very early black fiction writer. In the conger woman. That is great and is a great group work. Grover was a black southern sling for magic. Some of her goober dust in your eyes you would be bewitched. I was lucky to have a plan words as a writer. I was lucky i was able to use the word cooper and underground railroad. And talking about phrases. And this is to make a sort of hex are the plantation that would prevent slaves from running way. Sort of binding spell. So people would be afraid to run away because in process magical line and be cooper. They would be second by started this bad magic. I would assume that the magic didnt work. But the cynical 21st century the people would believe in conjuring or whatever it this word was. Host Pulitzer Prize wenner. He has been our guest on in depth. Heres a list of his books. The intuitionist, first book out, the colossus of new york, 2003 prayed apex high start in 2006. Safe harbor in 2009, another in 2011 needed about playing poker came out in 2014 and finally the Pulitzer Prize wenner. The underground railroad in 2016. A new book out one. Colson this year. Maybe next year. Host thank you for spinning three hours with our audience. Colson thank you for tuning in america. Youre watching book tv, on cspan2 every weekend with the latest Nonfiction Books and authors. It cspan2, created by americas Cable Television company is a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Were featuring book tv programs is a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2 per unit tonight, beginning at eight eastern, but to feature several programs with the late author and columnist william f. Buckley jr. And joyful to be on cspan2. When you read the things that were said about thomas jefferson, that he was in infidel and agent of the french government. It sounds a little reminiscent doesnt it. The things that were said about Abraham Lincoln come the things that were said about fdr that he wanted to be a dictator. So it just kind of come with the territory. But i think in trumps case, at least in the modern political era, postworld war ii. I have never seen anything like it. Sunday and noon eastern on in depth, only to our conversation with author and freight faith and Freedom Coalition ralph reed includes awakening, activate and is most recent forgotten country. Join in the conversation with your phone calls, and watch tvs in depth sunday and noon eastern on cspan2. On the director of programs and partnerships for the message to shes local society. The program is very seasonal. It is in lookout separating. Joined by professor will be speaking on her new publication. In the lives of summer reading. Shes a professor in the department of english