I don't know how many times, if at all, the fact that a writer repeats on the Pulitzer has happened. What of Colson Whitehead With the Pulitzer in 2017 and 2020 it is already an idyll of a great creator, an honor that allows him to be humble anywhere. Because behind him his trail of winner says it all.
But the point is that we are talking about a deserved award, to make matters worse in that envy that will corrode others like, what do I know, the very Paul auster that he has never won it.
This new novel takes up the author's taste for cradle losers, those for whom the future is a meager barren field and destiny an almost always infertile effort. Even more so if, from a young age, punishment and humiliation appear like every seed of humanity.
The funny thing is to make us all tune in to that notion of defeat. Because magically and simply we are all aiming for a great and inevitable defeat, you know which one, right?
Since childhood, Elwood Curtis has listened with devotion, on his grandmother's old record player, to the speeches of Martin Luther King. His ideas, like those of James Baldwin, have made this black teenager a promising student who dreams of a decent future.
But this is of little use at the Nickel Academy for Boys: a reformatory that boasts of turning its inmates into full-fledged men but hides an inhuman reality endorsed by many and ignored by all. Elwood tries to survive in this place with Turner, his best friend on Nickel. The idealism of one and the cunning of the other will lead them to make a decision that will have irreparable consequences.
From The underground railway, Colson Whitehead brings us a story based on the shocking true case of a Florida reformatory that destroyed the lives of thousands of children and earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. This dazzling novel, straddling the present moment and the end of the American racial segregation of the sixties, directly challenges the reader and shows the genius of a writer at the peak of his career.
You can now buy the novel "The Nickel Boys", by Colson Whitehead, here: