It’s the birthday of two Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) and Michael Cunningham (b. 1952); today we talk about Whitehead, whose 2016 alternative history novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller.

The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old female slave escaping north. But the Underground Railroad in the novel is not metaphorical: it’s an actual system of rails underground. The NY Times review called the book “a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.” The author himself says that the book’s final pages are, for him, hopeful, optimistic.

(Your word for the week: hallucinatory.)

Whitehead grew up in Manhattan and went to private schools where he was one of the only students of color. He hated playing outdoors, preferring to stay inside and watch horror movies while snacking on bologna and Lucky Charms. His parents supported this interest; Whitehead says, “Mom and Dad didn’t believe in censorship. We enjoyed beheadings, disembowellings, sexual assaults—all sorts of flickering R-rated depravity—the way others might take in a Grand Canyon vista: as a family.” (Read this article here by Whitehead for more on his growing up on a steady diet of horror.)

Whitehead studied at Harvard and then wrote reviews for The Village Voice. His first novel, The Intuitionist, came out in 1999 and is a work of speculative fiction about elevator inspection in the 20th century. (Seriously. And it sounds fascinating.) John Henry Days (2001) is about the legendary steel-driving man and his tunnels. Several more novels followed, including Zone One (2011), a literary zombie story about efforts to resettle Manhattan after a zombie plague; the book became a bestseller, thus justifying Whitehead’s childhood obsession with horror. (Zombies, by the way, are the one thing that he says have haunted his dreams over the years.)

Whitehead lives in New York City with (I believe) his second wife; he has two children. He’s received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and a passel of other impressive awards and fellowships. His next novel, The Nickel Boys, comes out in 2019. And several of his books are going on my list.

Have an entirely zombie-free Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.