Colson Whitehead Books: What He Inherited and What He Made His Own

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0500

Patricia has been watching me read Colson Whitehead for thirty years. Not all at once, not as a project, but book by book as they arrived, each one doing something different from the last. Last week she asked me what I was going to say about him, having spent the spring writing about Wright and Baldwin and Hurston. I told her I wasn’t sure yet. She said: “You’re sure. You’re just stalling because he matters too much.” She reads three mysteries a week and doesn’t miss much.

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Colson Whitehead Books: What He Inherited and What He Made His Own