An imaginative leap into real-life horror
When Colson Whitehead ’91 first came to Harvard, he wanted to write novels about vampires and werewolves. Twenty-five years later, with several books behind him and MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships under his belt, his latest work, “The Underground Railroad,” has become a sensation, winning raves from Oprah Winfrey and many others as well as a National Book Award nomination. The novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in a Georgia plantation who becomes a runaway thanks to an actual subterranean train that helps slaves escape to freedom. The Gazette interviewed Whitehead about his desire to become a writer, his time at Harvard, and the legacy of slavery. GAZETTE: What did you learn at Harvard that helped you as a fiction writer? WHITEHEAD: When I got to college I wanted to write a hard novel, a Stephen King-type, with werewolves and vampires. During my first year, I took Robert Brustein’s post-modern...