[ Music ] >> The selection and
presentation of the Library of Congress Prize for
American Fiction is one of my favorite responsibilities
as librarian of Congress. The prize gives this great
institution an opportunity to honor our nation's best
novelists or short-story writers for their enduring excellence,
from their debut book to their most recent novels
or short-story collections. Past prize winners of the
prize include such luminaries as E. L. Doctorow, Louise
Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Annie Proulx. It is my distinct
honor and pleasure to award the prize
this year to one of our nation's most
gifted writers, someone Time magazine has
called America's Storyteller. He is the youngest recipient of
this Library of Congress Award and one of only four
writers in history to receive the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction twice. I'm talking about none
other than Colson Whitehead, whose most recent
novel, "The Nickel Boys," won this year's Pulitzer,
as did his 2016 novel "The Underground Railroad." Colson has an extraordinary
ability to write about historical events
and transform them into metaphors fraught with
meaning and relevance for today. He is that rare writer
of literary fiction, whose works are also
bestsellers, a testament to his
talent for communicating to everyone who cares to listen. This award is the result of
the recommendations from more than 60 literary
peers, and I was happy to accept their choice. Colson Whitehead, please
accept the 2020 Library of Congress Prize
for American Fiction. >> Yeah, wow! It's a real, you
know, big honor. I've been writing for 29 years
now, first as a journalist at The Village Voice newspaper
in New York, which closed down last year and
then as a novelist. And I've had many ups and downs. Sometimes, you write a book
and people sort of get it, and then sometimes they don't. And whenever things are, you
know, going really badly, I would just say,
"Keep going, Colson. Don't give up, or else you'll
have to get a real job, and Lord knows you
don't want to do that." So thank you, Library
of Congress, for affirming my resolve
not to get a real job, and I'll definitely think about
this moment when I feel low in the future when a
book's not going that well. I know people are pulling
for me, so thanks a lot. >> Colson, a very big
congratulations to you from the Library of Congress, which is where I'm
sitting right now in the Members' Room
in Washington DC. And we're going to talk a
little bit about your career, and I should introduce myself
to the good people out there. First, I'm Marie Arana, and
I'm the literary director of the Library of
Congress, and we are very, very proud to be giving
this award to you, Colson. What an extraordinary series of
achievements that you've made in such a short time, really, sort of since your
publication in 2000. It's been 20 years, and
we are super impressed because you are the
youngest person ever to receive this prize. And you're going to
go on to do a lot more in your lifetime achievement,
but just big huzzahs from the Library
of Congress to you. >> Thanks, thanks [laughs]. >> So we want to take a little
walk through your career, all 20 years of it,
and we'll start really with a little background on you. You were born in Manhattan. You went to school in Manhattan. Then you went off to Harvard. Then you, as you mentioned, you started in journalism
at The Village Voice. Where did the writing
bug bite you? When did that start? >> Yeah, I was very young. You know, as a kid, I
didn't like to do sports or leave the house,
and my perfect day when I was a little
kid was staying home, reading comic books,
Marvel comic books, watching Twilight Zone reruns,
and reading Stephen King. You know, every year, my mom would buy the new Stephen
King novel, his great sort of late '70s, early '80s run, and we'd all sit
around the house. And I thought when I
was in 7th or 8th grade that writing the X-Men or
Spiderman would be a great job, writing novels about vampires
and robots would be very cool. I could work from home, not
talk to people, and it seemed like an all around good gig. >> Well, you've talked
about this, and you've said this many
times, so it's nothing new. But your first novel,
your first attempt at a novel was you
call it a failure. You got rejected, and you went
back to the drawing board again to sort of to do it
better, to do it right. And what made you stick to it
after that first rejection? >> You know, yeah, I wanted to become a writer
when I was younger. I wanted to write in college,
but I really became a writer by being rejected and
realizing that even if no one understood
what I was doing, I had no choice but
to keep going. And so that meant maybe this
next book won't be published, but the next one after that,
or the next one after that. And just in the act of
writing these different things that people may like
or may not like, I'll become a better writer. And so it was really just
realizing that if I want to devote my life to this,
I have to pick myself up and start, and write a
page, and then another page, and then it adds up if you
keep doing it [laughs], and no one else is going
to do it, so you might as well not waste any time. >> Yeah, that's just a good
lesson in general, isn't it, I mean, that the creative life
doesn't always soar, yeah. So it's a very good lesson,
I think, for the rest of us. The first time we saw
you, the first time that your public really
knew who you were -- and you made a pretty
big mark with it -- was your first book
that was published, which was The Intuitionist. And it was compared to Ralph
Ellison's "Invisible Man." It was compared to
Bernard Malamud. And I can actually
see those comparisons because it was somewhat
hallucinatory as Ellison was in "Invisible Man," and it also
funny and wry like Malamud, so I see those comparisons. What do you think of when people
make those comparisons of you? I mean, do you have
those models? Were you an admirer of
those particular authors? >> Yeah, I mean, you know,
certainly Ralph Ellison. I remember reading
the first chapter of "Invisible Man" in 7th grade. It was one of those books
that collect short stories for elementary school kids,
you know, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and then
inevitably "The Lottery," and then Invisible
Man's first chapter. And I remember just
thinking, "Oh, here's this weird black
guy, Ralph Ellison. I don't know what
the story is about. It's crazy, but if he's
doing, maybe I could do it." I think because I learned,
you know, to love literature by reading fantastic literature when there were absurd set
pieces in "Invisible Man" or when I encountered magic
realism, García Márquez, I saw how the fantastic
could be a tool for talking about the realistic. And so I learned a lot from
Ellison, and, you know, when people, you know,
compare me to a very talented, lovely person, I'm
always flattered. And if that's your frame
of reference, I'll take it. I'm not going to write an
angry letter to the editor. >> Yeah, well, you went
on from "The Intuitionist" and making a very big splash
with your first book to do "John Henry Days"
about John Henry and that extraordinary
competition with the trains. "Colossus of New York,"
"Apex Hides the Hurt," "Sag Harbor," "Zone One." I've got to say, Colson, each
one of your books when I look at each one of your books, each
one has been a new invention. You completely have -- There is
no genre of Colson Whitehead. There is no sort
of formula here. I don't hear the same
voice in every book. It's different. Do you mean that to happen? >> It just sort of, you know,
sort of happened that way. You know, I think partially if
I do a book that's very serious, maybe the next project could
be a little more funny, have more capacity for humor. A long book maybe followed
by a short book or a novel by a book of non-fiction. But I grew up loving David
Bowie and Stanley Kubrick. And, of course, they're
artists who always change it up from project to project. So Stanley Kubrick
would do his war movie, science fiction movie,
horror movie, just trying all these
different genres. You can do something
once, why do it again? It seems. And David Bowie,
you know, in the '70s and '80s would always change his
persona from record to record. And it seemed like maybe that
was a rule I internalized about being an artist. If you do something
once, why would you want to do it again the next time? So with, say, "Underground
Railroad" and "Nickel Boys," they both deal with
American history and institutional racism,
but one uses fantasy, "The Underground Railroad," and the other one is
shorter and more realistic. And that sort of switching up
is a way of keeping, you know, the work fresh for me, and maybe
it disappoints some readers here and there, here and
there [laughs], but maybe they'll come back
with the next one after that. >> I wouldn't say it
disappoints any readers, but it puzzles the
literary critics. You know, I come from
literary criticism, and you love nothing more
-- one loves nothing more -- as a critic than to be able
to pigeonhole somebody. And we can't pigeonhole
you, and I was imagining if somebody were trying
to pigeonhole you, Colson, they would say, okay, boys,
"Sag Harbor," "Nickel Boys" -- You don't get much
farther than that. You can say trains. You can say John Henry,
"Underground Railroad," but you don't get much
farther than that. So it's impressive, really,
the invention, the imagination, goes to different places
with you every time. >> Well, yeah, thanks. I mean, another thing is
like I think New York City, my hometown, and the
city, as a figure, is a bit in "John Henry
Days," and my book of essays about New York of the
"Colossus of New York." It's in "Zone One," a sort of fantastic New York
City after the apocalypse. And the book I've just finished
writing takes place in Harlem in the '60s, and so I keep
returning to my hometown. Hopefully, I'm finding
different ways of talking about it because, again,
you know, if I found one way of doing something, what's
the point of doing it again? >> I want to talk about your
hometown because, you know, you come from a family that
was into commerce and finance. Your parents were
both business people, if I'm right about that -- >> Sure. >> -- so that you have a very -- you're very attuned to
the commercial world. And there are not many writers
today who are novelists today who are talking about work,
business, commerce, but I see it in your work, and there's a
very strong sort of affinity and understanding of, you
know, the business at hand, the work out there, the city. >> Yeah, I think it's, you
know, it's the way we live. You know, we're all sort of
prey to late-stage capitalism, and so definitely our
roles in the machinery of business is important,
the way we receive, consume, idealize consumer products
is a recurring theme. I think you can't really talk about America unless
you're talking about money, race, class. These things are entwined. And so, you know, in a book
where I'm taking a step back and trying to figure out how
the world works, you know, money is a big part
of it and class. >> You mentioned race, and
there's a constant awareness of race in all of your books,
and it takes it almost in -- I would say in a Toni Morrison
way or a Joseph Heller way. It takes race -- It goes
into the big picture. I mean, you can actually read
your books as saying more about the big picture
than what they're saying about the events on the page. So, obviously, this is something
that's very much on your mind. Is it something that's
deliberate, or is it something that just is there,
part of you and the way that you speak and
see the world? >> Sure, I mean, you know,
my race, my Americanness, my New Yorkness, you know,
define how I view things. They're one of the, you
know, one of the many lenses through which I view the world, and they inform my
work, definitely. I have some books where race
is important and some books where race is not important
at all, like my book about New York, which -- >> Right. >> -- you know, has chapters about rush hour and
Central Park. And it's not black Central
Park or black rush hour. It's just rush hour. But race does, you know, define
so much of my experiences in life, and I'm glad that I can
address it in this or that piece of fiction and, like the city, find different ways
of talking about it. Race functions one way
in "Sag Harbor," which is about being a teenage
black kid in the 1980s, differently than in "Underground
Railroad," which steps back to examine slavery and
institutional racism and how an attitude towards
blackness, white supremacy, has defined our country. And so if I can find different
ways of talking about race or history and the city,
I think I'm doing my job. >> Yeah, it's incredible to
me because you then did -- I mean, you talk about light,
dark, light, dark in your work, and you've actually
described it as a jokey book, and then a serious book, and then a jokey book,
and a serious book. But these last two
books of yours, both of them Pulitzer
Prize winners, "The Underground Railroad" and
"Nickel Boys" take a deep dive into race and history,
very strongly so. And I wonder to what extent your
journalistic background leads you in this direction. And is this something
that -- And in both books. Well, not in both books. "Nickel Boys" not at all. But in "The Underground
Railroad," you fuse history with fantasy, in a way. And so it seems to me
that you're being drawn into a historical mode
in your latest two works. Is this now a passion of
yours, or is it a phase, or how would you
describe this history? >> I guess, you know, for
me, just I find it useful. I think in "Zone One"
and "John Henry Days," "Apex Hides the Hurt,"
I was writing about contemporary society,
and I think I've said my fill. I don't [laughs]
have that much to say about how we live right now. But going to the past has
provided a lot of material and forced me to think about how
we got here in different ways. You know, coming to slavery as
someone in their 40s as opposed to a little kid seeing Roots or
a college kid studying history, I understand slavery
in a different way, in a more grownup way. Researching the Jim Crow
era in the "Nickel Boys," I understand how the big
laws restricting black life and the smaller laws that
provided daily humiliation for black citizens -- I
understand it differently. And so I found more things to
talk about by going to the past. The book I just finished takes
place in Harlem in the '60s, and, you know, it doesn't deal
with institutional racism. It deals more with class and
money, it being New York City. But, you know, I was forced
to write about New York in a new way and
research the city in this period just before
I appear on the scene. I was born in '69. So what was New York like in
the late '50s and early '60s? I don't know. And in doing research, I
find a different way to talk about the city and a different
way of viewing things, and it's been very
useful for my work. >> Absolutely. And so my question to
you is what do you do for relief, for fun? What do you like to read apart
when you're working because, as we all know, being
a writer is living in a very deep rabbit
hole, right? You're working in
a solitary fashion. You are diving deep
into what you're doing. Sometimes, you're in a trance,
and if you're in that zone, it's a good thing,
but what do you do when you come out of that zone? How do you have fun? What do you read? What interests you
apart from writing? >> Yeah, I mean, I
guess the only thing that really interests
me is cooking. I started cooking, you know,
when I got out of college. And a novel takes a year, years. You make a meal, it's
a couple of hours, and you get to actually enjoy
it, as opposed to a novel, which [laughs], you can't
really share with people until a lot of time has passed. So that's good. To read, you know, in
these sort of hectic times with the pandemic and the
daily onslaught of bad news and politics, my attention
span is really shot, so I can only really
read journalism and then books for research. So I long for the day when
there's less news to distract me and a place where I'm
not working on something. And I have a big stack
of stuff I want to read. Brit Bennett has a new book
called The Vanishing Half, and her first book,
The Mothers, was great. It came out four years
ago, and I met her. It was her debut, and it's nice to see the young folks
continue to thrive. N. K. Jemisin writes
science fiction and fantasy. I read her "Fifth Season"
books, you know, two years ago, and she has a new one
called "The City We Became." It's about New York through a
fantastic lens, which, you know, overlaps with my
concerns about the city, and also "Zone One" is
a fantastic New York. So I'm excited to
see how she does it. So, unfortunately, all I can
really do right now is read books for research, and right
now that's sort of "New York in the 70s" for another
book about New York. And I wish had the
attention span to read for fun, but perhaps one day. >> Those are great works. Those are wonderful. And, in fact, I should
say the librarian of Congress always gives this
prize during the National Book Festival, and so here
we are in the middle of the National Book Festival,
Colson, and the festival -- And, in fact, N. K.
Jemisin is in this festival with her new book, so
that's a good thing. You've just given
her a nice nod. Thank you. >> Yeah, hopefully [assumed
spelling], we're not appearing at the same time so, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's a pity. You would have had a great time at the gala party before
the festival opened. But I want to say
to you the theme of this festival is American
ingenuity, and we're meant to think about, you know,
for a moment perhaps -- at least for the time that this
festival is onstage and in view, in public view -- of the sort of
abiding good stuff that's deep down in the creative world, in
the world of ingenious people like you who bring us these
tremendously wonderful and nourishing adventures
and stories. So the theme, though,
is American ingenuity, and what exactly would you say,
Colson, ingenuity is to you? How do you see ingenuity and particularly American
ingenuity if we have that? >> Well, given what I've worked
on for the last like six years, those two books, I
would say it's survival. A slave escaping north. A slave surviving and
protecting their child so their child can perhaps be
born to a better world and in that generation or generations after that be free,
enjoy freedom. And then I've been reading a lot
about New York in the '70s and, again, survival comes up. I think after this pandemic
subsides and recedes, New York and the rest of the country
will need a lot of TLC. I think New York
always bounces back. I'm reading a book about the
arts in New York, the birth -- in the 1970s, the
cities in the '70s. New York City in the '70s
was in a terrible place. It was broke, dirty,
everyone angry. And there were artists inventing
hip-hop, artists inventing punk, inventing a new form of
jazz, New York salsa. So in the ruins of this very
dilapidated New York City, you have artists coming together
to make these really vital songs and new forms of music
that didn't exist and that survival
transcending your environment to make something new
and pass something on. So it was my two thoughts. >> That's a great thought,
and I think that survival and maybe resilience too. And I see those last two books
of yours where there are very, very high stakes and violence
all around and that sense of resilience and survival
is so strong there. It's important to be aware of
history, and it's important for us now to go back
and to review the history of black Americans and
to look it in the eye and to teach it in
the classroom. Why is it important
to you, Colson? >> I guess the typical answer is
so we don't repeat our mistakes. I think, in this case, it's to
see how much we've yet to do in terms of repairing the
fundamental flaws in terms of race when you're talking about black folks
or Native Americans. When "The Underground Railroad"
came out, people would say, "Our original sin is slavery." I think original sin
is the disposition and genocide of Native
Americans. And some -- I don't think
that's taught very thoroughly in schools. Slavery and the civil
rights movement not told very thoroughly. I think better since
when I was a kid, but not as deeply
as it should be. And if we don't know
where we screwed up and what we still have
to fix, you can't fix it. >> I was really impressed when
I heard you say the other day, some time ago, that you
use primary sources, and that's very important
to you because I'm assuming that you're going back and
looking at slave narratives, and you're looking at actual
source material like that. That is material that
comes from memory. It's not historians writing it and perhaps imposing
their point of view. It's the people themselves. Why is memory perhaps in
that kind of narrative just as important as the evaluated,
considered, examined history? >> Well, I mean, there's so
much that in, say, "Underground" and "Nickel Boys" that
lives because it's stuff that wouldn't exist in
a historian's account. It's the slang. It's nouns and verbs that
escape the official narratives. And so when I was going
to slave narratives and then the oral histories
collected by the US government in the 1930s, they were trying
to put writers back to work and have them interview
former slaves. All that language, when they
talk about what they wore, how they planted, this dead
language we don't use anymore is living in their first-person
accounts. And so it's invaluable
to a fiction writer, but a historian would
never think to preserve. It's what makes,
I think, you know, those last two stories
definitely sing. And without those first-person
accounts, we lose, you know, so much of how we used to live
and how people used to dream. >> Were you a student
of history back in Harvard when you were there? >> No, I mean, I really
-- I was an English major, and the department
was very conservative. There was one class, I think,
that taught the American Novel After 1945, and it
was great stuff. It was Toni Morrison and Ralph
Ellison, so I finally got to read "Invisible Man,"
not just the first section. But that means I had
to sort of hunt around, and so I took classes in the African-American studies
program, in the theater program. I wasn't an actor,
but I studied drama. I studied plays and
some literature classes, writers in foreign
languages that be taught in the English department. And so I think I became more of
a student of history by trying to make my stories
actually live. You know, it's one thing to
say, "Here's a kooky idea. The Underground Railroad
is a real railroad." Even if I'm not going
to stick to reality, how did the Underground
Railroad work, and then how did slavery work? How do I make this
fantastic story real? And that led me to
study history. There were certain books
that I've written where, say, "Sag Harbor," which was just
listening to '80s hip-hop and New Age [assumed
spelling] music, Suzie Nebanchie [phonetic]
and Bow House [phonetic]. And then there are books
that require different kind of research, and it's
definitely nice to mix them up. >> [laughs] So I'm sitting in
the Library of Congress, right, and right upstairs is Thomas
Jefferson's collection, his original collection, which
was actually the foundation of the Library of Congress. When the Library burned down
in 1812 during the 1812 British attack on Washington,
Jefferson actually said, "Okay, all those books burned down. Now you can buy mine." And there were, you know,
thousands of books that came from the Jefferson
collection, and they are here. They're sitting here. And the way that he organized
his library was the way that Francis Bacon organized
his library, which was memory, reason, and then
the imagination. So memory would be history,
reason would be philosophy, science, and imagination
would be fiction. And so where do you fit if
you were to be put in one of those categories, or
do you straddle all three? >> I'm not sure. You know, it's really for
other people to situate or not situate my books. Apparently, billions of
people in the world live full and happy lives without ever
thinking about my books -- >> Librarians, right? >> -- and I really could go --
So I'm happy they exist at all. And, you know, we were talking
earlier about switching genres, and I'm so happy that, you
know, the books are out there and someone can, say, pick up
"Sag Harbor" and think, "Oh, you know, he's a writer of
humor," and someone could pick up "Underground Railroad"
and say, "Oh, he's a historical novelist," or
my book about the World Series of Poker, and say, "He's
a nonfiction writer who makes a lot of weird jokes." And so I don't think
too much about how to classify these things. For me, it's all just
work, a good fun kind of work, not difficult work. I mean, it's hard, but -- And
so, yeah, I think I'll leave it to other people and,
for me, just be glad that it's even an
issue to talk about. >> Well, I think somehow
you absorb all three of those things, and you do
it, and you do it beautifully. You do straddle. We are living, Colson, in these
very uncertain times right now. We have a lot of
issues to resolve. We have a country that
is obviously in flux and in pain, to some degree. And this uncertainty, this
unrest, this feeling of unrest, what would you say to the people
out there who are listening to you now about this? What is your message
to perhaps the young or just the ordinary people who would value your
wisdom right now? >> Yeah, I think it's a way
to talk to people my age and older and a bit younger. Anyone under 20 who wants a
piece of advice, I would say, "Don't do what we did. You know, we left a lot of
messes and problems for you. You're still young. Maybe you're not
stuck in your ways. You can fix everything
we screwed up. You basically have no
choice if you want to live on a planet that's not
120 degrees every day. So good luck. Don't do what we did." And that's not very
cheerful, and I apologize, but [laughs] that's
the way I see it. >> Very, very nicely put. Colson, big congratulations
on the Library of Congress Prize
for American Fiction. We are so delighted to be
giving this prize to you, and it's such an honor
to talk to you just now. >> And I'm delighted as well. Thanks so much and stay safe,
and I hope to see you guys in person not too far from now. >> Absolutely, thank
you, Colson. [ Music ]
