Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys is written by Colson Whitehead, who depicts an incredible and resilient story on the treatment of African American youth during the Civil Rights movement. The story is based on a young African American boy named Elwood, a young man living in Florida who was wrongfully arrested while trying to attend a class at a university and then being sent to Nickel Academy which was a reform school for boys. In the academy, the young African American males were targeted and abused to the…

Based on the historic Dozier Reform School, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead is a haunting narrative that delves into the depths of systemic racism and its enduring legacy. Set in the 1960s, the novel follows the harrowing experiences of Elwood Curtis and his peers at Nickel Academy, a fictional version of the real-life Dozier School for Boys located in Florida. Originally published in 2019, Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys exposes the brutality and injustice inherent in the American penal system…

In writing his novel, Whitehead dared to extend beyond the boundaries of the preset genre of historical fiction, incorporating elements of fantasy without discrediting his subject matter. His incredibly unique style of writing allows his readers to automatically buy into the authenticity…

encounter to remain the same. Indeed, change is inevitable and life is full of surprises. As a matter of fact, sometimes change can be good in the world whereas other times it may be forced on you. In J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and Colson Whitehead’s short story,…

belittle others and in contrast, encourage the need to work together for the greater good of the situation. By remembering what these mean to readers, characters help portrays the human in someone and thus assert their own way of life to their peers. In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad,…

hearing the sounds of whistling plane engines from afar, and waking up on a Saturday eating ice cream every once in a while was a commodity to accept. Comparatively, as to Elwood and Turner reacting to the social and political hierarchy at the time in Colson Whitehead’s novel, “The Nickel Boys,” biased wrongful convictions, and hierarchy, can be shown through Elwood’s treatment of…

Expansion of the truth allows us as humans to closely examine the individual truths of a situation and hence better understand the whole. Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad utilizes embellishment of the truths of pre-Civil War America to help us as the audience better understand this era in history, through describing the fictional account of Cora, a runaway slave, and her adventures to freedom through an actual underground railroad. However, there is an extent to which fiction…

With a world as bleak and violent as the one in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, the only way to cope with its traumas is by looking to the past. By doing so, this brings the characters in the novel some semblance of familiarity in their lives as well as reclaim some of their autonomy from the plague, which has already taken so much from them. Despite the comfort that the past provides for each character, it is essential to his or her survival to focus on the present and the zombie-infested world…

material from a moment in history with the intent of using it in the development of a fictional narrative, opening the door for the use of a variety of literary devices that would be inoperative otherwise. The genre of historical fiction, as displayed in Colson Whitehead’s novel, “The Underground Railroad”, stresses interpretation of history through fictional humanization and other literary devices, which creates a catalyst for emotional appeal in the reader—an appeal…

African American women in New York City in the 1950’s were suppressed but not for long. In this novel there is a women named Laila and she goes through a lot of hardship but she pushes though it and persevere. This novel starts off with Laila an African American woman in the 1950’s in New York City. She is an elevator inspector who is one of the best in New York. She goes to an 11 story building and does her job. But the elevator has a free fall the whole eleven stories. She thinks that…