THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD; A Novel

Whitehead, Colson

ISBN 10: 0385542364 / ISBN 13: 9780385542364

Published by Doubleday, New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland, 2016

About this Item

SIGNED by the Author on a free front endpaper, 8vo, off-white quarter cloth with black lettering on spine over black boards, Mylar-protected lettered dust jacket (unclipped) by Oliver Munday, [xii] +306 pages. Colson Whitehead (born 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of six novels, including his debut work, the 1999 novel The Intuitionist, and The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION and the 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION, and was long-listed for the Man Booker prize of 2017. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius Grant"). SUPERIOR COPY internally & externally! VERY, very slight rubbing at corners of the bright, clean, sharp dust jacket. No remainder markings. Bookseller Inventory # 4062

Bibliographic Details

Title: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD; A Novel

Publisher: Doubleday, New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland

Publication Date: 2016

Binding: Cloth and boards

Book Condition: Very Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: First Edition, First Printing.

About this title

Synopsis:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
     In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
     Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

About the Author:

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the 2016 National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, as well as The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Colossus of New York. He is also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. He lives in New York City.