How Colson Whitehead Writes About Our ‘Big Wild Country’
About this episode
Two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead joins Klein to talk about his heist novel 'Harlem Shuffle' and the craft behind his shape-shifting career. Whitehead traces his desire to write to Marvel comics and Stephen King, explains his meticulous outlining process, and discusses the 'divided self' of his protagonist Ray Carney — a striver torn between legitimate business and the family criminal trade. They explore how parenthood made his fiction more empathetic, what researching slavery for 'The Underground Railroad' taught him about America, whether capitalism allows honest success, and why New York keeps pulling him back as a subject. The episode closes, as always, with book recommendations — and Whitehead's reflections on failure, persistence, and the unglamorous discipline of writing sentences that don't disappoint.