49- ] American Literature - Sandra Cisneros

 49- ] American Literature 

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros, (born December 20, 1954, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American short-story writer and poet best known for her groundbreaking evocation of Mexican American life in Chicago. She is best known for her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), and her subsequent short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments with literary forms that investigate emerging subject positions, which Cisneros herself attributes to growing up in a context of cultural hybridity and economic inequality that endowed her with unique stories to tell.[1] She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, was awarded one of 25 new Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowships in 2017, and is regarded as a key figure in Chicano literature.

After graduating from Chicago’s Loyola University (B.A., 1976), Cisneros attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (M.F.A., 1978). There she developed what was to be the theme of most of her writing, her unique experiences as a Hispanic woman in a largely alien culture.

Cisneros’s first book was Bad Boys (1980), a volume of poetry. She gained international attention with her first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1983), written in a defiant youthful voice that reflected her own memories of a girlhood spent trying to be a creative writer in an antagonistic environment. More poetry—including The Rodrigo Poems (1985), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman (1994)—followed. The children’s book Hairs = Pelitos (1994) uses the differing hair textures within a single family to explore issues of human diversity. The volume was based on an episode related in The House on Mango Street and was told in both Spanish and English.

Her collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), contains tales of beleaguered girls and women who nonetheless feel that they have power over their destinies. She returned to long fiction with Caramelo; o, puro cuento (2002), a semiautobiographical work that echoes her own peripatetic childhood in a large family. Have You Seen Marie? (2012) concerns the efforts of a middle-aged woman to help her friend find a lost cat while meditating on her mother’s death. The tale, which mirrored similar experiences in Cisneros’s own life, was illustrated with images by the artist Ester Hernandez. A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (2015) is a wide-ranging memoir. Inspired by Cisneros’s travels when she was an aspiring author, Martita, I Remember You (2021) follows twentysomething Corina, who leaves her Mexican family in Chicago to pursue her literary dreams in Paris, where she befriends other expatriates. In 2022 she published Woman Without Shame: Poems, her first collection of poetry in nearly three decades. When asked whether she had been writing poems during that period, she told The New Yorker that “I wasn’t writing them every day. I just wrote them when I had to. If I didn’t have poetry, I would have to be on Xanax or Prozac. It’s my medicine.”

Writing process

Cisneros' writing is often influenced by her personal experiences and by observations of many of the people in her community. She once confided to other writers at a conference in Santa Fe that she writes down "snippets of dialogue or monologue—records of conversations she hears wherever she goes." These snippets are then mixed and matched to create her stories. Names for her characters often come from the San Antonio phone book; "she leafs through the listings for a last name, then repeats the process for a first name." By mixing and matching she is assured that she is not appropriating anyone's real name or real story, but at the same time her versions of characters and stories are believable.

Cisneros once found herself so immersed in the characters of her book Woman Hollering Creek that they began to infiltrate her subconscious mind. Once while she was writing the story "Eyes of Zapata," she awoke "in the middle of the night, convinced for the moment that she was Ines, the young bride of the Mexican revolutionary. Her dream conversation with Zapata then became those characters' dialogue in her story."

Her biculturalism and bilingualism are also very important aspects of her writing. Cisneros was quoted by Robin Ganz as saying that she is grateful to have "twice as many words to pick from ... two ways of looking at the world," and Ganz referred to her "wide range of experience" as a "double-edged sword." Cisneros's ability to speak two languages and to write about her two cultures gives her a unique position from where she is able to tell not just her story, but also the stories of those around her.

Community legacy

Cisneros has been instrumental in building a strong community in San Antonio among other artists and writers through her work with the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. The Macondo Foundation, which is named after the town in Gabriel García Márquez's book One Hundred Years of Solitude, "works with dedicated and compassionate writers who view their work and talents as part of a larger task of community-building and non-violent social change." Officially incorporated in 2006, the foundation began in 1998 as a small workshop that took place in Cisneros's kitchen. The Macondo Writers Workshop, which has since become an annual event, brings together writers "working on geographic, cultural, economic, social and spiritual borders" and has grown from 15 participants to over 120 participants in the first 9 years . Currently working out of Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, the Macondo Foundation makes awards such as the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Milagro Award honoring the memory of Anzaldúa, a fellow Chicana writer who died in 2004, by providing Chicano writers with support when they are in need of some time to heal their "body, heart or spirit" and the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award which was created in memory of Sandra Cisneros's mother. Macondo offers services to member writers such as health insurance and the opportunity to participate in the Casa Azul Residency Program. The Residency Program provides writers with a furnished room and office in the Casa Azul, a blue house across the street from where Cisneros lives in San Antonio, which is also the headquarters of the Macondo Foundation. In creating this program, Cisneros "imagined the Casa as a space where Macondistas could retreat from the distractions of everyday life and have a room of his/her own for the process of emotional, intellectual and spiritual introspection."

Cisneros founded the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation in 1999. Named in memory of her father, the foundation "has awarded over $75,500 to writers born in Texas, writing about Texas, or living in Texas since 2007". Its intention is to honor Cisneros's father's memory by showcasing writers who are as proud of their craft as Alfredo was of his craft as an upholsterer.

Cisneros co-founded with Bryce Milligan the Annual Texas Small Bookfair, the forerunner to the Inter-American Bookfair.

Chicano literary movement

Literary critic Claudia Sadowski-Smith has called Cisneros "perhaps the most famous Chicana writer",[30] and Cisneros has been acknowledged as a pioneer in her literary field as the first female Mexican-American writer to have her work published by a mainstream publisher. In 1989, The House on Mango Street, which was originally published by the small Hispanic publishing company Arte Público Press, was reissued in a second edition by Vintage Press; and in 1991 Woman Hollering Creek was published by Random House. As Ganz observes, previously only male Chicano authors had successfully made the crossover from smaller publishers. That Cisneros had garnered enough attention to be taken on by Vintage Press said a lot about the possibility for Chicano literature to become more widely recognized. Cisneros spoke of her success and what it meant for Chicana literature in an interview on National Public Radio on 19 September 1991:

I think I can't be happy if I'm the only one that's getting published by Random House when I know there are such magnificent writers – both Latinos and Latinas, both Chicanos and Chicanas – in the U.S. whose books are not published by mainstream presses or whom the mainstream isn't even aware of. And, you know, if my success means that other presses will take a second look at these writers ... and publish them in larger numbers, then our ship will come in.

As a pioneer Chicana author, Cisneros filled a void by bringing to the fore a genre that had previously been at the margins of mainstream literature. With her first novel, The House on Mango Street, she moved away from the poetic style that was common in Chicana literature at the time and began to define a "distinctive Chicana literary space", challenging familiar literary forms and addressing subjects such as gender inequality and the marginalization of cultural minorities. According to literary critic Alvina E Quintana, The House on Mango Street is a book that has reached beyond the Chicano and Latino literary communities and is now read by people of all ethnicities. Quintana states that Cisneros's writing is accessible for both Anglo- and Mexican-Americans alike since it is free from anger or accusation, presenting the issues (such as Chicana identity and gender inequalities) in an approachable way. Cisneros's writing has been influential in shaping both Chicana and feminist literature. Quintana sees her fiction as a form of social commentary, contributing to a literary tradition that resembles the work of contemporary cultural anthropologists in its attempt to authentically represent the cultural experience of a group of people, and acknowledges Cisneros's contribution to Chicana feminist aesthetics by bringing women to the center as empowered protagonists in much of her work.

Writing style

Bilingualism

Cisneros often incorporates Spanish into her English writing, using Spanish instead of English where she feels that Spanish better conveys the meaning or improves the rhythm of the passage. However, where possible she constructs sentences so that non-Spanish speakers can infer the meaning of Spanish words from their context. In Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories Cisneros writes: "La Gritona. Such a funny name for such a lovely arroyo. But that's what they called the creek that ran behind the house."[41] Even if the English-speaking reader does not initially know that arroyo means creek, Cisneros soon translates it in a way that does not interrupt the flow of the text. She enjoys manipulating the two languages, creating new expressions in English by literally translating Spanish phrases.[40] In the same book Cisneros writes: "And at the next full moon, I gave light, Tía Chucha holding up our handsome, strong-lunged boy." Previous sentences inform the reader that a baby is being born, but only a Spanish speaker will notice that "I gave light" is a literal translation of the Spanish "dí a luz" which means "I gave birth." Cisneros joins other Hispanic-American US writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Piri Thomas, Giannina Braschi, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and Junot Díaz, who create playful linguistic hybrids of Spanish and English.[43] Cisneros noted on this process: "All of a sudden something happens to the English, something really new is happening, a new spice is added to the English language." Spanish always has a role in Cisneros's work, even when she writes in English. As she discovered, after writing The House on Mango Street primarily in English, "the syntax, the sensibility, the diminutives, the way of looking at inanimate objects" were all characteristic of Spanish. For Cisneros, Spanish brings to her work not only colorful expressions, but also a distinctive rhythm and attitude.

Narrative modes, diction, and apparent simplicity

Cisneros's fiction comes in various forms—as novels, poems, and short stories—by which she challenges both social conventions, with her "celebratory breaking of sexual taboos and trespassing across the restrictions that limit the lives and experiences of Chicanas", and literary ones, with her "bold experimentation with literary voice and her development of a hybrid form that weaves poetry into prose". Published in 1991, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-two short stories that form a collage of narrative techniques, each serving to engage and affect the reader in a different way. Cisneros alternates between first person, third person, and stream-of-consciousness narrative modes, and ranges from brief impressionistic vignettes to longer event-driven stories, and from highly poetic language to brutally frank realist language. Some stories lack a narrator to mediate between the characters and the reader; they are instead composed of textual fragments or conversations "overheard" by the reader. For example, "Little Miracles, Kept Promises" is composed of fictional notes asking for the blessings of patron saints, and "The Marlboro Man" transcribes a gossiping telephone conversation between two female characters.

Works by Cisneros can appear simple at first reading, but this is deceptive. She invites the reader to move beyond the text by recognizing larger social processes within the microcosm of everyday life: the phone conversation in "The Marlboro Man" is not merely idle gossip, but a text that allows the reader to dig into the characters' psyches and analyze their cultural influences. Literary critics have noted how Cisneros tackles complex theoretical and social issues through the vehicle of apparently simple characters and situations. For example, Ramón Saldívar observes that The House on Mango Street "represents from the simplicity of childhood vision the enormously complex process of the construction of the gendered subject". In the same vein, Felicia J. Cruz describes how each individual will interact differently with Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, thus eliciting such varied reader responses as "it is about growing up", to "it's about a Chicana's growing up", to "it is a critique of patriarchal structures and exclusionary practices". Cisneros's writing is rich not only for its symbolism and imagery, deemed by critic Deborah L Madsen to be "both technically and aesthetically accomplished", but also for its social commentary and power to "evoke highly personal responses". this helped her achieve the way she taught.

Literary themes

Place

When Cisneros describes the aspirations and struggles of Chicanas, the theme of place often emerges. Place refers not only to her novels' geographic locations, but also to the positions her characters hold within their social context. Chicanas frequently occupy Anglo-dominated and male-dominated places where they are subject to a variety of oppressive and prejudicial behaviors; one of these places that is of particular interest to Cisneros is the home.[50] As literary critics Deborah L. Madsen and Ramón Saldívar have described, the home can be an oppressive place for Chicanas where they are subjugated to the will of male heads-of-household, or in the case of their own home, it can be an empowering place where they can act autonomously and express themselves creatively. In The House on Mango Street the young protagonist, Esperanza, longs to have her own house: "Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after." An aspiring writer, Esperanza yearns for "a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."[52] She feels discontented and trapped in her family home, and witnesses other women in the same position. According to Saldívar, Cisneros communicates through this character that a woman needs her own place in order to realize her full potential—a home which is not a site of patriarchal violence, but instead "a site of poetic self-creation." One source of conflict and grief for Cisneros's Chicana characters is that the male-dominated society in which they live denies them this place. Critics such as Jacqueline Doyle and Felicia J. Cruz have compared this theme in Cisneros's work to one of the key concepts in Virginia Woolf's famous essay "A Room of One's Own", that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," or put another way, "economic security" and personal liberty are necessary for "artistic production."

 Cisneros explores the issue of place in relation not only to gender but also to class. As Saldívar has noted, "Aside from the personal requirement of a gendered woman's space, Esperanza recognizes the collective requirements of the working poor and the homeless as well."[55] He refers to Esperanza's determination not to forget her working-class roots once she obtains her dream house, and to open her doors to those who are less fortunate. Esperanza says "Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house."[52] According to Saldívar, this statement of Esperanza's alludes to "the necessity for a decent living space" that is fundamental to all people, despite the different oppressions they face.

Construction of femininity and female sexuality

As Madsen has described, Cisneros's "effort to negotiate a cross-cultural identity is complicated by the need to challenge the deeply rooted patriarchal values of both Mexican and American cultures." The lives of all Cisneros's female characters are affected by how femininity and female sexuality are defined within this patriarchal value system and they must struggle to rework these definitions. As Cisneros has said: "There's always this balancing act, we've got to define what we think is fine for ourselves instead of what our culture says."

Cisneros shows how Chicanas, like women of many other ethnicities, internalize these norms starting at a young age, through informal education by family members and popular culture. In The House on Mango Street, for example, a group of girl characters speculate about what function a woman's hips have: "They're good for holding a baby when you're cooking, Rachel says ... You need them to dance, says Lucy ... You gotta know how to walk with hips, practice you know." Traditional female roles, such as childrearing, cooking, and attracting male attention, are understood by Cisneros's characters to be their biological destiny. However, when they reach adolescence and womanhood, they must reconcile their expectations about love and sex with their own experiences of disillusionment, confusion and anguish. Esperanza describes her "sexual initiation"—an assault by a group of Anglo-American boys while awaiting her friend Sally at the fairground. She feels stricken and powerless after this, but above all betrayed; not only by Sally, who was not there for her, but "by all the women who ever failed to contradict the romantic mythology of love and sex". Cisneros illustrates how this romantic mythology, fueled by popular culture, is often at odds with reality in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, where multiple references to romantic telenovelas obsessively watched by the female characters are juxtaposed with the abuse and poverty they face in their own lives.

When Cisneros addresses the subject of female sexuality, she often portrays negative scenarios in which men exert control over women through control over their sexuality, and explores the gap she perceives between the real sexual experiences of women and their idealized representation in popular culture. However, Cisneros also describes female sexuality in extremely positive terms, especially in her poetry. This is true, for example, of her 1987 volume of poetry My Wicked, Wicked Ways. According to Madsen, Cisneros refers to herself as "wicked" for having "reappropriated, taken control of, her own sexuality and the articulation of it – a power forbidden to women under patriarchy". Through these poems she aims to represent "the reality of female sexuality" so that women readers will recognize the "divisive effects" of the stereotypes that they are expected to conform to, and "discover the potential for joy in their bodies that is denied them".

Cisneros breaks the boundary between what is a socially acceptable way for women to act and speak and what is not, using language and imagery that have a "boisterous humor" and "extrovert energy" and are even at times "deliberately shocking". Not all readers appreciate this "shocking" quality of some of Cisneros's work. Both female and male readers have criticized Cisneros for the ways she celebrates her sexuality, such as the suggestive photograph of herself on the My Wicked, Wicked Ways cover (3rd Woman Press, 1987). Cisneros says of this photo: "The cover is of a woman appropriating her own sexuality. In some ways, that's also why it's wicked: the scene is trespassing that boundary by saying 'I defy you. I'm going to tell my own story.'" Some readers "failed to perceive the transgressive meaning of the gesture", thinking that she was merely being lewd for shock value, and questioned her legitimacy as a feminist. Cisneros's initial response to this was dismay, but then she reports thinking "Wait a second, where's your sense of humor? And why can't a feminist be sexy?"

Construction of Chicana identity

The challenges faced by Cisneros's characters on account of their gender cannot be understood in isolation from their culture, for the norms that dictate how women and men ought to think and behave are culturally determined and thus distinct for different cultural groups. Through her works, Cisneros conveys the experiences of Chicanas confronting the "deeply rooted patriarchal values" of Mexican culture through interactions not only with Mexican fathers, but the broader community which exerts pressure upon them to conform to a narrow definition of womanhood and a subservient position to men.

A recurrent theme in Cisneros's work is the triad of figures that writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa has referred to as "Our Mothers": the Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche and La Llorona. These symbolic figures are of great importance to identity politics and popular culture in Mexico and the southwest United States, and have been used, argues theorist Norma Alarcón, as reference points "for controlling, interpreting, or visualizing women" in Mexican-American culture.

Many theorists, including Jacqueline Doyle, Jean Wyatt, Emma Perez and Cordelia Candelaria, have argued that the gender identity of Mexican and Chicana women is complexly constructed in reference to these three figures. La Virgen de Guadalupe, a Catholic icon of the manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the Americas, is revered in Mexico as a "nurturing and inspiring mother and maiden". La Malinche, the indigenous mistress and intermediary of conquistador Hernán Cortés, has according to Wyatt "become the representative of a female sexuality at once passive, "rapeable," and always already guilty of betrayal". Cisneros describes the problematic dichotomy of the virgin and the whore presented by these two figures: "We're raised in a Mexican culture that has two role models: La Malinche and la Virgen de Guadalupe. And you know that's a hard route to go, one or the other, there's no in-betweens." Madsen has noted that these 'good' and 'bad' archetypes are further complicated by the perception, held by many Chicana feminists, that they would be guilty of betraying their people, like La Malinche, if they attempt to define their femininity in more "Anglo" terms. Through her work, Cisneros critiques the pressures Chicanas face to suppress their sexuality or channel it into socially acceptable forms so as to not be labeled "Malinchista[s] ... corrupted by gringa influences which threaten to splinter [their] people".

The third figure, La Llorona, who derives from a centuries-old Mexican/Southwestern folktale, is "a proud young girl [who] marries above her station and is so enraged when her husband takes a mistress of his own class that she drowns their children in the river". She dies grief-stricken by the edge of the river after she is unable to retrieve her children and it is claimed that she can be heard wailing for them in the sound of the wind and water. These entities, from the gentle and pure Virgen de Guadalupe, to the violated and treacherous la Malinche, to the eternally grieving la Llorona give rise to a "fragmentary subjectivity" often experienced by Chicanas, and their need to come to terms with them, renegotiate them on their own terms, or reject them altogether.

The three "Mothers" come out most clearly in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In the stories "Never Marry a Mexican" and "Woman Hollering Creek", the female protagonists grapple with these "Mexican icons of sexuality and motherhood that, internalized, seem to impose on them a limited and even negative definition of their own identities as women". The protagonist in "Never Marry a Mexican" is haunted by the myth of la Malinche, who is considered a whore and a traitor, and defies la Malinche's passive sexuality with her own aggressive one. In "Woman Hollering Creek" the protagonist reinvents the la Llorona myth when she decides to take charge of her own future, and that of her children, and discovers that the grito of the myth, which is the Spanish word for the sound made by la Llorona, can be interpreted as a "joyous holler" rather than a grieving wail. It is the borderland, that symbolic middle ground between two cultures, which "offers a space where such a negotiation with fixed gender ideals is at least possible".

Borderland

Even though that Cisneros does not explicitly locate her stories and novels on the Mexico-U.S. border, Sadowski-Smith identifies the concept as perhaps Cisneros's most salient theme due to the constant border crossings, both real and metaphorical, of characters in all of her works. The House on Mango Street takes place in Chicago where the narrator lives, and in Mexico City where she visits extended family. Caramelo primarily takes place in those settings as well, but part of the book details the narrator's experiences as a teenager in San Antonio, TX. Various characters in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories also make trips to Mexico to reunite with family members. However, to quote literary critics Jesús Benito and Ana María Manzanas, the "image of the border has become fully meaningful not only when we consider it as a physical line but when we decenter it and liberate it from the notion of space to encompass notions of sex, class, gender, ethnicity, identity, and community." Cisneros frequently divorces the border from its strictly geographic meaning, using it metaphorically to explore how Chicana identity is an amalgamation of both Mexican and Anglo-American cultures. The border represents the everyday experiences of people who are neither fully from one place nor the other; at times the border is fluid and two cultures can coexist harmoniously within a single person, but at other times it is rigid and there is an acute tension between them. Literary critic Katherine Payant has analyzed the border metaphor in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which manifests in references to the Chicana/o characters' Mexican roots and the (im)migration between the two countries, the recurrence of overlapping pre-Columbian, mestizo and Southwestern Chicano myths, and the portrayal of Chicanas/os as "straddling two or three cultures." Payant makes use of Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of living "on the borderlands" to describe the experience of Cisneros's Chicana characters who, in addition to their struggle to overcome patriarchal constructs of their gender and sexual identity, must negotiate linguistic and cultural boundaries.

48- ] American Literature - Shirely Jackson

48- ] American Literature

Shirley Jackson

1916–1965 

Shirley Jackson, in full Shirley Hardie Jackson, (born December 14, 1916, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 8, 1965, North Bennington, Vermont), American novelist and short-story writer best known for her story “The Lottery” (1948). She was an American writer known primarily for her works of horror and mystery. Over the duration of her writing career, which spanned over two decades, she composed six novels, two memoirs, and more than 200 short stories.

Jackson graduated from Syracuse University in 1940 and married the American literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. They settled in North Bennington in 1945. Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) are witty and humorous fictionalized memoirs about their life with their four children. The light comic tone of those books contrasts sharply with the dark pessimism of Jackson’s other works, whose general theme is the presence of evil and chaos just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday life. “The Lottery,” a chilling tale whose meaning has been much debated, provoked widespread public outrage when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948. Jackson’s six finished novels, especially The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), further established her reputation as a master of gothic horror and psychological suspense.

Writing career

"The Lottery" and early publications

In 1948, Jackson published her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, which tells a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood growing up in Burlingame, California, in the 1920s. Jackson's most famous story, "The Lottery", first published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, established her reputation as a master of the horror tale.[43] The story prompted over 300 letters from readers,[44] many of them outraged at its conjuring of a dark aspect of human nature,[43] characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation, and old-fashioned abuse".[45] In the July 22, 1948, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jackson offered the following in response to persistent queries from her readers about her intentions: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village, to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."[46]

The critical reaction to the story was unequivocally positive; the story quickly became a standard in anthologies and was adapted for television in 1952.[47] In 1949, "The Lottery" was published in a short story collection of Jackson's titled The Lottery and Other Stories.[48]

Jackson's second novel, Hangsaman (1951), contained elements similar to the mysterious real-life December 1, 1946, disappearance of an 18-year-old Bennington College sophomore Paula Jean Welden. This event, which remains unsolved to this day, took place in the wooded wilderness of Glastenbury Mountain near Bennington in southern Vermont, where Jackson and her family were living at the time. The fictional college depicted in Hangsaman is based in part on Jackson's experiences at Bennington College, as indicated by Jackson's papers in the Library of Congress.[49][50] The event also served as inspiration for her short story "The Missing Girl" (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957, and posthumously in Just an Ordinary Day [1996]).

The following year, she published Life Among the Savages, a semi-autobiographical collection of short stories based on her own life with her four children,[51] many of which had been published prior in popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and Collier's.[47] Semi-fictionalized versions of her marriage and the experience of bringing up four children, these works are "true-to-life funny-housewife stories" of the type later popularized by such writers as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck during the 1950s and 1960s.[52]

Reluctant to discuss her work with the public, Jackson wrote in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft's Twentieth Century Authors (1955):[53]

I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains, naturally, no pertinent facts. I was born in San Francisco in 1919 [sic] and spent most of my early life in California. I was married in 1940 to Stanley Edgar Hyman, critic and numismatist, and we live in Vermont, in a quiet rural community with fine scenery and comfortably far away from city life. Our major exports are books and children, both of which we produce in abundance. The children are Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry: my books include three novels, The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest and a collection of short stories, The Lottery. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

"The persona that Jackson presented to the world was powerful, witty, even imposing," wrote Zoë Heller in The New Yorker. "She could be sharp and aggressive with fey Bennington girls and salesclerks and people who interrupted her writing. Her letters are filled with tartly funny observations. Describing the bewildered response of The New Yorker readers to 'The Lottery,' she notes, 'The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washing machine at the end would amaze you.'"[8]

The Haunting of Hill House and other works

In 1954, Jackson published The Bird's Nest (1954), which detailed a woman with multiple personalities and her relationship with her psychiatrist.[54] One of Jackson's publishers, Roger Straus, deemed The Bird's Nest "a perfect novel", but the publishing house marketed it as a psychological horror story, which displeased her.[55] Her following novel, The Sundial, was published four years later and concerned a family of wealthy eccentrics who believe they have been chosen to survive the end of the world.[56] She later published two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.

Jackson's fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), follows a group of individuals participating in a paranormal study at a reportedly haunted mansion.[57] The novel, which interpolated supernatural phenomena with psychology,[58] went on to become a critically esteemed example of the haunted house story,[43][59] and was described by Stephen King as one of the most important horror novels of the twentieth century.[60] Also in 1959, Jackson published the one-act children's musical The Bad Children, based on Hansel and Gretel.[61]

Critical assessment

Lenemaja Friedman's Shirley Jackson (Twayne Publishers, 1975) was the first published survey of Jackson's life and work. Judy Oppenheimer also covers Shirley Jackson's life and career in Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (Putnam, 1988). S. T. Joshi's The Modern Weird Tale (2001) offers a critical essay on Jackson's work.[94]

A comprehensive overview of Jackson's short fiction is Joan Wylie Hall's Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne Publishers, 1993).[95] The only critical bibliography of Jackson's work is Paul N. Reinsch's A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson, American Writer (1919–1965): Reviews, Criticism, Adaptations (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).[96][97] Darryl Hattenhauer also provides a comprehensive survey of all of Jackson's fiction in Shirley Jackson's American Gothic (State University of New York Press, 2003). Bernice Murphy's Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (McFarland & Company, 2005) is a collection of commentaries on Jackson's work. Colin Hains's Frightened by a Word: Shirley Jackson & Lesbian Gothic (2007) explores the lesbian themes in Jackson's major novels.[98]

According to the post-feminist critic Elaine Showalter, Jackson's work is the single most important mid-twentieth-century body of literary output yet to have its value reevaluated by critics.[99] In a March 4, 2009, podcast distributed by the business publisher The Economist, Showalter also noted that Joyce Carol Oates had edited a collection of Jackson's work called Shirley Jackson Novels and Stories that was published in the [100][101] Library of America series.[102]

Oates wrote of Jackson's fiction: "Characterized by the caprice and fatalism of fairy tales, the fiction of Shirley Jackson exerts a mordant, hypnotic spell."[103]

Jackson's husband wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years".[104] Hyman insisted that the dark visions found in Jackson's work were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but, rather, comprised "a sensitive and faithful anatomy" of the Cold War era in which she lived, "fitting symbols for [a] distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb".[105] Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as indicated by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned 'The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story".[105]

The 1980s witnessed considerable scholarly interest in Jackson's work. Peter Kosenko, a Marxist critic, advanced an economic interpretation of "The Lottery" that focused on "the inequitable stratification of the social order".[106] Sue Veregge Lape argued in her Ph.D. thesis that feminist critics who did not consider Jackson to be a feminist played a significant role in her lack of earlier critical attention.[107] In contrast, Jacob Appel has written that Jackson was an "anti-regionalist writer" whose criticism of New England proved unpalatable to the American literary establishment.[108]

In 2009, critic Harold Bloom published an extensive study of Jackson's work, challenging the notion that it was worthy of inclusion in the Western canon; Bloom wrote of "The Lottery", specifically: "Her art of narration [stays] on the surface, and could not depict individual identities. Even 'The Lottery' wounds you once, and once only."[109]

Works

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2016)

Novels

The Road Through the Wall (Farrar, Straus, 1948) , Hangsaman (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951) , The Bird's Nest (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954) , The Sundial (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958) , The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959) , We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Viking, 1962) , Shirley Jackson: Four Novels of the 1940s & 50s, ed. Ruth Franklin (Library of America, 2020)

Short fiction

Collections

The Lottery and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus, 1949) , The Magic of Shirley Jackson (ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman; Farrar, Straus, 1966) , Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures (ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman; Viking, 1968) , Just an Ordinary Day (ed. Laurence & Sarah Hyman; Bantam, 1996) , Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories (ed. Joyce Carol Oates; Library of America, 2010) , Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (ed. Laurence & Sarah Hyman; Random House, 2015) , Dark Tales (Penguin, 2016)

47- ] American Literature - Edith Wharton

47- ] American Literature 

Edith Wharton

1862–1937 

Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, (born January 24, 1862, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 11, 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, near Paris, France), American author best known for her stories and novels about the upper-class society into which she was born. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.

Edith Jones came of a distinguished and long-established New York family. She was educated by private tutors and governesses at home and in Europe, where the family resided for six years after the American Civil War, and she read voraciously. She made her debut in society in 1879 and married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Boston banker, in 1885.

Although she had had a book of her own poems privately printed when she was 16, it was not until after several years of married life that Wharton began to write in earnest. Her major literary model was Henry James, whom she knew, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues. She contributed a few poems and stories to Harper’s, Scribner’s, and other magazines in the 1890s, and in 1897, after overseeing the remodeling of a house in Newport, Rhode Island, she collaborated with the architect Ogden Codman, Jr., on The Decoration of Houses. Her next books, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), were collections of stories.

Wharton’s first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published in 1902. The House of Mirth (1905) was a novel of manners that analyzed the stratified society in which she had been reared and its reaction to social change. The book won her critical acclaim and a wide audience. In the next two decades—before the quality of her work began to decline under the demands of writing for women’s magazines—she wrote such novels as The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), and The Age of Innocence (1920), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Age of Innocence presents a picture of upper-class New York society in the 1870s. In the story, Newland Archer is engaged to May Welland, a beautiful but proper fellow member of elite society, but he falls deeply in love with Ellen Olenska, a former member of their circle who has returned to New York to escape her disastrous marriage to a Polish nobleman. Both lovers prove too obedient to conventional taboos to break with their upper-class social surroundings, however, and Newland feels compelled to renounce Ellen and marry May.

Wharton’s best-known work is the long tale Ethan Frome (1911), which exploits the grimmer possibilities of the New England farm life she observed from her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. The protagonist, the farmer Ethan Frome, is married to a whining hypochondriac but falls in love with her cousin, Mattie. As she is forced to leave his household, Frome tries to end their dilemma by steering their bobsled into a tree, but he ends up only crippling Mattie for life. They spend the rest of their miserable lives together with his wife on the farm.

Wharton’s short stories, which appeared in numerous collections, among them Xingu and Other Stories (1916), demonstrate her gifts for social satire and comedy, as do the four novelettes collected in Old New York (1924). Her 1915 reporting for Scribner’s Magazine on the Western Front in World War I was collected as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1918). In her manual The Writing of Fiction (1925) she acknowledged her debt to Henry James. Among her later novels are Twilight Sleep (1927), Hudson River Bracketed (1929), and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932). Her autobiography, A Backward Glance, appeared in 1934. In all Wharton published more than 50 books, including fiction, short stories, travel books, historical novels, and criticism.

She lived in France after 1907, visiting the United States only at rare intervals. She was divorced from her husband in 1913 and was a close friend of novelist James in his later years.

Career

Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to her 15 novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.

In 1873, Wharton wrote a short story and gave it to her mother to read. Stinging from her mother's critique, Wharton decided to write only poetry. While she constantly sought her mother's approval and love, she rarely received either, and their relationship was a troubled one.[65] Before she was 15, Wharton wrote Fast and Loose (1877). In her youth, she wrote about society. Her central themes came from her experiences with her parents. She was very critical of her work and wrote public reviews criticizing it. She also wrote about her own experiences with life. "Intense Love's Utterance" is a poem written about Henry Stevens.

In 1889, she sent out three poems for publication, to Scribner's, Harper's and Century. Edward L. Burlingame published "The Last Giustiniani" for Scribner's. It was not until Wharton was 29 that her first short story was published: "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story. She completed "The Fullness of Life" following her annual European trip with Teddy. Burlingame was critical of this story but Wharton did not want to make edits to it. This story, along with many others, speaks about her marriage. She sent Bunner Sisters to Scribner's in 1892. Burlingame wrote back that it was too long for Scribner's to publish. This story is believed to be based on an experience she had as a child. It did not see publication until 1916 and is included in the collection called Xingu. After a visit with her friend, Paul Bourget, she wrote "The Good May Come" and "The Lamp of Psyche". "The Lamp of Psyche" was a comical story with verbal wit and sorrow. After "Something Exquisite" was rejected by Burlingame, she lost confidence in herself. She started travel writing in 1894.

In 1901, Wharton wrote a two-act play called Man of Genius. This play was about an English man who was having an affair with his secretary. The play was rehearsed but was never produced. Another 1901 play, The Shadow of a Doubt, which also came close to being staged but fell through, was thought to be lost, until it was discovered in 2017. Its world premiere was a radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2018.[66] She collaborated with Marie Tempest to write another play, but the two only completed four acts before Marie decided she was no longer interested in costume plays. One of her earliest literary endeavors (1902) was the translation of the play Es Lebe das Leben ("The Joy of Living"), by Hermann Sudermann. The Joy of Living was criticized for its title because the heroine swallows poison at the end, and was a short-lived Broadway production. It was, however, a successful book.[37]

Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-19th-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Themes

Versions of her mother, Lucretia Jones, often appeared in Wharton's fiction. Biographer Hermione Lee described it as "one of the most lethal acts of revenge ever taken by a writing daughter."[25] In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as indolent, spendthrift, censorious, disapproving, superficial, icy, dry and ironic.[25]

Wharton's writings often dealt with themes such as "social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the new elite."[67] Maureen Howard, editor of Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, notes several recurring themes in Wharton's short stories, including confinement and attempts at freedom, the morality of the author, critiques of intellectual pretension, and the "unmasking" of the truth.[68] Wharton's writing also explored themes of "social mores and social reform" as they relate to the "extremes and anxieties of the Gilded Age".[67] These themes were expressed in her ghost stories, in which supernatural specters function as richly costumed variations on a theme of all-too-human cruelty.[69]

A key recurring theme in Wharton's writing is the relationship between the house as a physical space and its relationship to its inhabitant's characteristics and emotions. Maureen Howard argues "Edith Wharton conceived of houses, dwelling places, in extended imagery of shelter and dispossession. Houses – their confinement and their theatrical possibilities…they are never mere settings."

Influences

American children's stories containing slang were forbidden in Wharton's childhood home.[70] This included such popular authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joel Chandler Harris. She was allowed to read Louisa May Alcott but Wharton preferred Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby.[70] Wharton's mother forbade her from reading many novels and Wharton said she "read everything else but novels until the day of my marriage." [70] Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and Washington Irving.[71] Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself "out of Old New York" and her influences included Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen.[72] These influenced her ethnographic style of novelization.[72] Wharton developed a passion for Walt Whitman.[73]

Works

Novels

The Valley of Decision, 1902 , The House of Mirth, 1905 , The Fruit of the Tree, 1907 , The Reef, 1912 , The Custom of the Country, 1913 , Summer, 1917 , The Marne, 1918 , The Age of Innocence, 1920 (Pulitzer Prize winner)

The Spinster, 1921 , The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922 , A Son at the Front, 1923 , The Old Maid, 1924 , The Mother's Recompense, 1925 , Twilight Sleep, 1927 , The Children, 1928 , Hudson River Bracketed, 1929 , The Gods Arrive, 1932 , The Buccaneers, 1938 (unfinished) , Novellas and novelette , The Touchstone, 1900 , Sanctuary, 1903 , Madame de Treymes, 1907 , Ethan Frome, 1911 , Bunner Sisters, 1916 , Old New York, 1924 , 1. False Dawn; 2. The Old Maid; 3. The Spark; 4. New Year's Day , Fast and Loose: A Novelette, 1938 (written in 1876–1877)

Poetry

Verses, 1878 , Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, 1909 , Twelve Poems, 1926

Short story collections

The Greater Inclination, 1899, includes Souls Belated. , Crucial Instances, 1901 , The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1904 , The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories, 1908 , Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910 , Xingu and Other Stories, 1916 , "Xingu"; "Coming Home"; "Autres Temps ..."; "Kerfol"; "The Long Run"; "The Triumph of Night"; "The Choice"; "The Bunner Sisters" , Here and Beyond, 1926 , Certain People, 1930 , Human Nature, 1933 , The World Over, 1936 , Ghosts, 1937 , Roman Fever and Other Stories, 1964 , Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Novelettes, 1970 , The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, 1973 , "The Lady's Maid's Bell"; "The Eyes"; "Afterward"; "Kerfol"; "The Triumph of Night"; "Miss Mary Pask"; "Bewitched"; "Mr Jones"; "Pomegranate Seed"; "The Looking Glass"; "All Souls" , The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, 1998 (Carroll & Graf Publishers; paperback, 640 pages) , "The Pelican"; "The Other Two"; "The Mission of Jane"; "The Reckoning"; "The Last Asset"; "The Letters"; "Autres Temps ..."; "The Long Run"; "After Holbein"; "Atrophy"; "Pomegranate Seed"; "Her Son"; "Charm Incorporated"; "All Souls"; "The Lamp of Psyche"; "A Journey"; "The Line of Least Resistance"; "The Moving Finger"; "Expiation"; "Les Metteurs en Scene"; "Full Circle"; "The Daunt Diana"; "Afterward"; "The Bolted Door"; "The Temperate Zone"; "Diagnosis"; "The Day of the Funeral"; "Confession"

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, 2007 paperback 452 pages, NYREV publishers

1. Mrs. Manstey's view; 2. That good may come; 3. The portrait; 4. A cup of cold water; 5. A journey; 6. The Rembrandt; 7. The other two; 8. The quicksand; 9. The dilettante; 10. The reckoning; 11. Expiation; 12. The pot-boiler; 13. His father's son; 14. Full circle; 15. Autres temps; 16. The long run; 17. After Holbein; 18. Diagnosis; 19. Pomegranate seed; 20. Roman fever

Non-fiction

The Decoration of Houses, 1897 , Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904 , Italian Backgrounds, 1905 , A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908 , The Cruise of the Vanadis, 1910 , Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915 , French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919 , In Morocco, 1920 (travel) , The Writing of Fiction, 1925 , A Backward Glance, 1934 (autobiography) , Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, Edited by Frederick Wegener, 1996 , Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920, 1995, Edited by Sarah Bird Wright

As editor , The Book of the Homeless, 1916

46- ] American Literature - Colson Whitehead

46- ] American Literature

Colson Whitehead 

Colson Whitehead, in full Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead, (born November 6, 1969, New York City, New York, U.S.), American author known for innovative novels that explore social themes, including racism, while often incorporating fantastical elements. He was the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for consecutive books: the historical novels The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019). He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for The Nickel Boys. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Whitehead grew up in Manhattan, and he enjoyed reading, especially comics and science fiction, from an early age. In 1991 he graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature. He then began writing movie, book, and television criticism for the weekly news and culture paper The Village Voice. He left that job in the late 1990s to Whitehead blended suspense and fantasy in his first novel, The Intuitionist (1999). The story centres on Lila Mae Watson, a Black elevator inspector who does her job through intuition and psychic connection rather than scientific means. After being framed for an elevator mishap, she uses detective skills to unravel the conspiracy. In the book Whitehead explored issues revolving around race, gender, and social progress. The Intuitionist earned widespread acclaim, and it was followed two years later by John Henry Days (2001). The novel centres on a Black freelance journalist named J who travels from New York City to West Virginia for a festival dedicated to John Henry, a character from African American folklore. According to legend, John Henry was a Black railroad-construction worker who bet that he could drive a steel spike into solid rock as fast as a newly invented steel-driving machine. Although he won the race and the wager, he died from the exertion. In the book J compares John Henry’s struggle against the machine to his own desire to break the record for most consecutive days attending publicity events. Whitehead next published Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and Sag Harbor (2009). In Zone One (2011) he described a post-apocalyptic America in which people try to survive after a virus has turned some humans into zombies.

concentrate on writing novels.

Whitehead received greater attention and critical acclaim in 2016 with the release of The Underground Railroad. In the novel, a slave catcher relentlessly pursues an enslaved girl who has escaped along actual underground railroad tracks—a reimagined Underground Railroad. Besides winning the Pulitzer Prize, Whitehead received the National Book Award for Fiction and the Booker Prize. His success continued with The Nickel Boys (2019). Based on real events, the book is set in 1960s Florida, which was then under Jim Crow laws that discriminated against African Americans. The story follows two Black teenagers who are sent to a juvenile reform school where they are physically and emotionally abused by administrators and teachers. The acclaimed work won several awards, most notably a Pulitzer. In 2021 Whitehead published Harlem Shuffle, a crime novel that opens in 1959 and centres on a furniture salesman who becomes involved in a scheme to rob a hotel.

Whitehead also wrote nonfiction, notably The Colossus of New York (2003), a collection of essays about New York City, and The Noble Hustle (2014), about the 2011 World Series of Poker.

During his career Whitehead taught at colleges and universities throughout the United States. He participated in speaking engagements. Among his other honours, Whitehead was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim fellowship (2013).

Career

After graduating from college, Whitehead wrote for The Village Voice. While working at the Voice, he began drafting his first novels.

Whitehead has since produced ten book-length works—eight novels and two non-fiction works, including a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of E.B. White's famous essay Here Is New York. His books are 1999's The Intuitionist; 2001's John Henry Days; 2003's The Colossus of New York; 2006's Apex Hides the Hurt; 2009's Sag Harbor; 2011's Zone One, a New York Times bestseller; 2016's The Underground Railroad, which earned a National Book Award for Fiction; 2019's The Nickel Boys; and 2021's Harlem Shuffle. Esquire magazine named The Intuitionist the best first novel of the year, and GQ called it one of the "novels of the millennium". Novelist John Updike, reviewing The Intuitionist in The New Yorker, called Whitehead "ambitious", "scintillating", and "strikingly original", adding, "The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead."

Whitehead's The Intuitionist was nominated as the Common Novel at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The Common Novel nomination was part of a long-time tradition at the Institute that included authors like Maya Angelou, Andre Dubus III, William Joseph Kennedy, and Anthony Swofford.

Whitehead's non-fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's.

His non-fiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death, was published by Doubleday in 2014.

Whitehead has taught at Princeton University, New York University, the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Wesleyan University. He has been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.

In the spring of 2015, he joined The New York Times Magazine to write a column on language.

His 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, was a selection of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, and was chosen by President Barack Obama as one of five books on his summer vacation reading list. In January 2017 it was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction at the American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference in Atlanta, GA. Colson was honored with the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for fiction presented by the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Judges of the prize called the novel "a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America".

Whitehead's seventh novel, The Nickel Boys, was published in July 2019. The novel was inspired by the real-life story of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where children convicted of minor offences suffered violent abuse. In conjunction with the publication of The Nickel Boys, Whitehead was featured on the cover of Time magazine for the July 8, 2019, edition, alongside the strap-line "America's Storyteller". The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Judges of the prize called the novel "a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". It was Whitehead's second win, making him the fourth writer in history to have won the prize twice. In 2022, it was announced that Whitehead will executive produce the upcoming film adaptation of the same name.

 Whitehead's eighth novel, Harlem Shuffle, was conceived and begun before he wrote The Nickel Boys. It is a work of crime fiction set in Harlem during the 1960s. Whitehead spent years writing the novel, and ultimately finished it in "bite-sized chunks" during the months he spent in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Harlem Shuffle was published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021.

Works

Fiction

The Intuitionist (1999), John Henry Days (2001), Apex Hides the Hurt (2006),

Sag Harbor (2009), Zone One (2011), The Underground Railroad (2016), The Nickel Boys (2019), Harlem Shuffle (2021), Crook Manifesto (2023)

Non-fiction

The Colossus of New York (2003), The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death (2014)

Essays

"Lost and Found". The New York Times Magazine. November 11, 2001.

"A Psychotronic Childhood". The New Yorker. June 4, 2012.

"Hard Times in the Uncanny Valley". Grantland. ESPN. August 24, 2012.

"Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia". Grantland. ESPN. May 19, 2013.

Short stories

"Down in Front". Granta (86: Film). Summer 2004. (subscription required)

"The Gangsters". The New Yorker. December 22, 2008.

"The Match". The New Yorker. April 1, 2019.

"The Theresa Job". The New Yorker. July 26, 2021.