Colson Whitehead’s Writing Routine

“I don’t go out. I forget to eat. I sleep very little. And once it’s done, I veg out and play video games for six weeks.”

Of the four people who have won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, only one has done it with back-to-back novels: Colson Whitehead. The first came in 2017 for The Underground Railroad, a genre-defying reimagining of slavery in which the titular railroad is rendered as a literal, subterranean train system.

The second came three years later, for The Nickel Boys, a stark and devastating account of abuse at a segregated reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida, based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys. That novel cemented Whitehead’s place as one of the most important American writers of his generation. It also nearly broke him.