Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad has been ranked No. 1 on the list of the 10 Greatest Books of the Last 20 Years, adding another major recognition to a novel that already won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction.
Collider’s ranking places The Underground Railroad at the top of its list. The novel stands above nine other books selected for their impact on storytelling over the past two decades.
The recognition also brings attention to the personal setting in which Whitehead worked on the acclaimed novel. During the writing process, the author used an office in the basement of his home. He described keeping his writing and family life separate while working on the book.
US author Colson Whitehead attends the lit.Cologne festival of literature in Cologne, Germany.Photo by Rolf Vennenbernd/picture alliance via Getty Images
“My office is in the basement of the house, and I would work down there and then come up around 3 PM to go shopping for food, cook for my family, then have dinner together,” he said, per BuzzFeed. “So I kept it very separate. When I was younger and had more energy, I worked at night but I can’t do that anymore. Instead, I just watch cooking shows and drink wine and go to sleep.”
That basement became the workspace for a novel that would later become one of Whitehead’s most recognized works.
Published by Doubleday in August 2016, The Underground Railroad follows Cora, an enslaved young woman living on a cotton plantation in Georgia. She decides to escape with Caesar, another enslaved person, after he tells her about the Underground Railroad.
Whitehead gives the historical idea a different form in the novel. Instead of being only a network used by people helping enslaved people escape, the Underground Railroad becomes a literal underground railway, complete with tracks, trains, engineers, conductors and secret stations.
Cora’s journey takes her through different places, including South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana. At each stop, she faces a different version of the dangers and racial systems surrounding Black people.
She is also pursued by Arnold Ridgeway, a determined slave catcher who has a personal reason for hunting her. Cora’s mother, Mabel, had escaped from the plantation years earlier, and Ridgeway had never been able to capture her.
Collider highlighted the way Whitehead uses Cora’s journey to examine racism, cruelty and social power. The ranking described Cora as a resilient and deeply human character whose desire for freedom drives the story.
The novel combines historical fiction with an alternate-history idea. Its fictional railroad allows Whitehead to move Cora through different versions of American society while keeping the violence and realities of slavery at the center of the story.
Goodreads lists the book with a 4.06 average rating based on hundreds of thousands of ratings. It also identifies the novel as the winner of the 2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Readers’ Favorite Historical Fiction.
The idea for The Underground Railroad did not begin shortly before publication. Whitehead said he first thought of the concept in 2000 while he was in Brooklyn.
“I first had the idea in 2000. I was in Brooklyn on my couch and heard some reference to The Underground Railroad and thought about how when I was a kid, I thought it was a literal railroad.”
At the time, Whitehead did not believe he was ready to write the story. He had recently completed a research-heavy book and felt that he needed more time before taking on the project.
He eventually returned to the idea and began working seriously on the novel in 2014. His research included narratives written by formerly enslaved people, including accounts collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
The novel became a major literary success after its 2016 publication. It won the National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Whitehead later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again for The Nickel Boys in 2020, making him one of only four writers to win the fiction prize twice.
The Underground Railroad also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction. It was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and was included on former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list.
The novel also reached audiences beyond the printed page. A television miniseries adaptation, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, was released on Amazon Prime Video in May 2021.
For a novel that began as an idea Whitehead carried for years and was written from a basement office at home, its journey has been remarkably far-reaching.
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