Who wrote The Underground Railroad, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?

Colson Whitehead wrote The Underground Railroad, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The novel follows Cora, an enslaved woman who escapes a plantation in Georgia. Whitehead transforms the historical Underground Railroad into a literal railway system beneath the ground, using speculative fiction to expose the realities of slavery, racial terror, and American injustice.

The book won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016. Its literal railroad is an imaginative device, not a claim that the historical network consisted of underground trains. In reality, the Underground Railroad was a secret network of people, routes, and safe houses that helped enslaved people seek freedom.

The novel made Whitehead the first author to win the Fiction Pulitzer in consecutive years when The Nickel Boys received the award in 2020. Its historical framework spans multiple periods and places, so it is best read as a speculative reworking of American history rather than a strictly realistic account.