The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award winner that defined the contemporary American conversation about slavery's afterlife in fiction. Cora, a sixteen-year-old slave on a Georgia plantation, escapes north with Caesar, another slave who has heard about the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead's reconception of the historical metaphor, the Underground Railroad is a literal underground railroad: subterranean stations, actual locomotives, a network of stationmasters and conductors. Each state Cora arrives at presents a different alternative history of American racial violence (a South Carolina with state-sponsored medical experimentation on Black residents, a North Carolina that has outlawed Black presence entirely).

Whitehead's project is closest to Toni Morrison's: building a novel that takes the moral weight of American slavery seriously while inventing the formal apparatus to do that work in contemporary fiction. The literalization of the railroad metaphor is the structural innovation that releases the novel from the conventional slave-narrative format and lets Whitehead build a more capacious moral argument. The South Carolina chapters are some of the most carefully constructed alternative-history prose in American literary fiction. The chase across multiple states gives the novel the propulsive structure that Whitehead's earlier work had sometimes lacked.

Recommended as required twenty-first century American literary fiction reading, as the natural next read for readers of Beloved, and as the right Whitehead entry point. The 2021 Barry Jenkins Amazon Prime adaptation is one of the best literary-fiction screen adaptations of the decade. Bahni Turpin's audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.