now the monthly in-depth program with best-selling fiction author colson whitehead. his books include the intuitionist's and harbor. this is part of the 2,018th special fiction edition of "in depth." >> host: this is our special

section "in depth." you'll see special guests like walter mosley, last month we had david ignatius, the "washington post" columnist in the thriller writer who writes about the cia and such. this month we are pleased to have the pulitzer prize author colson whitehead as the guest comment's most recent book "he underground railroad." what is the appropriate response when your books are praised by oprah, president obama, you win the pulitzer committee national book award, so what is the appropriate response? [laughter] >> guest: this book has taken off in a way that was unexpected so most of the i just thank my lucky stars and sleep a little betterne and try to enjoy it despite my best efforts.

>> host: why does that put you in a better mood? >> guest: i've been writing for 20 something years and sometimes you write a book and people dig it and understand it and other times nobody cares and it sort of disappears. so i have the pride thinking i did a good job on the book and the bonus of other people thinking that as well. >> host: the first was the intuitionist hel how do you sela book like that? >> guest: i wrote a prescription and send to my agent either you dig the concept of the elevator inspectors or you don't come either sort of along for the ride in the description or not and

definitely when i was writing it in my second attempt at a novel went to a bunch of publishers so per year anfor a year and a hald say to my friend i felt stupid and they would make fun of me. eventually after a year and a half, i finally got down to an interesting book. a couple of topics circled around the cities with a lot of ideas and vitality and energy from the city, pop culture, race, technology and some of the

themes are into some of the books, not so much in others. my book about new york, the cost of new york with a racialized take. myla poker book the hustle doest have much to say about technology, but those are four or five areas that have been kind of circled around. >> host: how do people read your book, autobiographical? >> guest: it does take off from my childhood. i would say the underground railroad is the most autobiographical book. i'm not in there in some sort of coded way, but from beginning to

the end that is a good way and then some are funny and some are a little more traffic. i hope the experience is worth your time. >> host: are you benji with a bad haircut? >> guest: he i >> guest: he is a 15-year-old kid growing up in the 80s as i did. my life was interesting and i have to exaggerate it was the month you have to pay a little bit ofu a license. it's never appeared on the page

and became less and less as the asbook took over. but the demands of the stories also supersede the autobiographical memoirs and try to make a compelling story, which means exaggerating what happened to me. >> host: colson, what is the process to get to the elevator inspectors, zombies, underground railroad that exists? >> guest: i like to mix it up. if you read a certain kind of book, why not do it again. but i think that finding a book that is heavy and following up.

when you look at the buck underground railroad to the historical novel i am keeping a very different and i think i get my ideas from articles and these musings i have on my couch. when you get an open spot on your schedule, are you ready, sometimes they fall away. bubut they come from a lot of different places. >> host: there seems to be a common theme in a lot of starbucks about a guy that

didn't get the rules of life and has a certain unease about a lot of people. >> guest: i don't want to tip my hand too early. i'm here for three hours, want to save some for the last hour. there is something about an hour later -- outsider. we are all sort of outsiders in different ways. you are in the action but also standing apart. so someone who observes and it's a perfect theme it is a good part of telling the story. it's nice to have a pointvi of view so my outside characters

come away with a tradition to the reader into the story. >> host: it didn't come out until 2011 but ie think i readn article that you had written thatti as a younger guy in the eighth or ninth grade. >> guest: though, definitely for me to going back decades there were terrible stories in college and i didn't write fiction untold my 20s. but the obsession with zombies is go back to my childhood. my parents loved horror movies into your number to seeing this at an early age and it stayed withad me.

it is a story about the eve of the zombie apocalypse. people were trying to hide and he is being pursued by white people that want to eat him which is part of the story of america. and so, growing up as a science fiction fan, five books in i thought i would maybe try my hand at a horror story. >> host: i get the impression that there was an obsession. >> guest: sure but yes, a real interest. we came of age during the boom, so we would go too crazy yetis,

an electronic store and rent movies, go through them, return them and start again the next week. so science fiction horror and comedy made me want to write a, lot of marvel comics when i was growing up my parents would buy stephen king novels and we would need them.ot fantasy, horror always seems to be a potent storytelling tool. people have different ideas about the themes and i found my own interpretations and put my own stamp on the genre of books was fun and important. they have their own needs with

things like dracula and 19th century england, something different for the twilight generation. for me, they've always been an expression of social anxiety and fear of other people. you go to bed and wake up and go has changed. coworkers, and they stoppedhe pretending. they y sort of let the mask down and figure out to get you. it's sort of always stayed with me and i have these various ideas in the back of my head.

>> host: [inaudible] >> guest: i'm not sure. i think worrying about the work will it be a good skill for getting a novelist. >> host: worrying about what others may think of your work? >> guest: it is anxiety versus worry, but this healthy amount helps you make sure that you are putting everything into this paragraph and the page making sure it's coming out right. >> host: you were quoted as saying for being a good novelist that is to fully inhabit one's

dilution to get get into every aspect of foolishness and it is a handy survival strategy. >> guest: i think what i like about my different books is that they are sort of odd and allow me to express ideas about the world and myself and different theories. it's becoming a way for me to interpret the world as myself and figure out how i feel about things, talking aboutab societal systems, politics. so that license is very important for me to follow my own inclinations. writing about elevator inspectors sounds like a bad

idea, a sort of pathetic idea. can you make it work and sell it to the reader at the same time. so the delusion that you have something to say and your work is worthy of being read by others. >> host: where did this term come from, did you see an elevator inspector? >> guest: dot book was about remember gary coleman, the tv star? a tv critic at the time in pop culture i figured i would write a novel about the gary coleman child star, it seemed like a

great idea to me in the novel and he's on a sitcom called i'm moving in because he was always getting adopted by rich white people. so i'm moving i i am moving in a soft realism. my agent sent out the book and everyone hated it. so i was just going to write another book, maybe people will like it and maybeis they won't. i wrote a lot of detective novels and suspense, and i was watching 2020.

if you don't repair escalators they can detach from the side and loseal a toe, very troubling you always seela the law but thy signed the certificate and they come once a year while you are at work or at school. wouldn't it be cool if an elevator inspector had to be an inspector to insult a criminal case, funny detective story so i went to the library to see what kind of skills and elevator inspector would bring to a criminal case. there were elevator inspectors, so it became like solving the

mystery of the fallen elevator and made a different culture and figured there are conservatives and progressives and became those who do it the right way versus the intuitionist who were progressive and it's sort of plays out in the buck in different ways so i was trying to teach myself how to write. when i have a female protagonist, i had a buck for every plot or any kind of linear momentum and then i took one idea as the elevato elevator ins with any criminal case and following it through to the execution. >> host: prior to starting this interview, you looked at the books on the table and said

sorry for the clunkers that you had to read. what do you consider those? >> guest: hopefully if you do something for a long time you get better at it. certain books i will look at and wonder why do i use so many asterisks? maybe it could lose the page or two. hopefully i become a o better writer and do things in a more efficient way. i'm in the getting better phase. >> host: does i' sign of moving into still exist? >> guest: the manuscript is

there. the energy that it would take to bring up to my now very high standards. if my children have a gambling debt 30 years from now to make some quick cash. >> host: so one of your female protagonists, wha but is there reason to write through the point of view? >> guest: you should pick different pointsl of view for part of that. we have seen why to mix it up.

i couldn't do my sort of hipster in new york voice. as a third person narrator, i could hopefully become a better writer. there's a famous narrative written called life of a slave girl and she enters into a terrible form of slavery, you're supposed to pump out more babies

comes about predicament is worthy of exploring so sometimes to mix it up and sometimes to learn something and keep the challenge is going. what was your favorite one toyo write? >> guest: this book was hard to write because i was broke and depressed. when you finish the then you can look back and think it's pretty preferable t for a special timen my life. i think it was one of the most fun to write taking off from as

many jokes as i could in a journalistic framework but i was trying to cram as many feared jokes into it and it was really fun. started from a journalistic assignment and they called me up to see to write about the world series but then they said what if we started paying you for the article and chart entrance fee. okay, i will do that. i just started cramming after i dropped my daughter off from school and the other parents would say what are you up to?

off to atlantic city to train for a permanent and gamble and come back then i thought the world series. so to get out of the comfort zone when i was writing it, writing the article, when you write a novel make yourself laugh. it's two years before someone else read it. with writing in a way like dickens for the immediate response and that gave me the energy to keep going so it was a

special kind of writing experience in terms of material and how it came to be. so six months. >> host: to paraphrase the first line of the book i got to wear sunglasses inside. it was good for me because i'm half dead anyway. >> guest: i've been told i have a good poker face, and i realized that it's becaus this f dead inside, which people take for a mask of a good poker player. but the aspect in a social situation u. >> host: i will help you unpack this a little bit. you do write about having him

ask and you are semi-impressed is that pain important? >> guest: partially itin is and it's good to have a healthy relationship in most things you do in life whether it is art or anything else. so i think it is important and in terms of demystifying it. to write some pages and hand themnt in and we can keep doing

what we like to do, so a lot of times writing is unpleasant. it's great to figure out a new sentence or character or a problem that you have been working on. but for me, not taking it too seriously and the character of the shot in this from the play that is partiallynd true and alo sort of default setting in my public relations to say what the heck. >> host: what was the easiest book to write? >> guest: they are all pretty hard i have to say. i'm going to go with a shorter one. the book i'm working on now is pretty i short, so short isn't

easy but it tends to not prolong the agony. >> host: when you win the pulitzer at the local board praised by oprah and by president obama, does that put a lot of pressure on the next bo book? ..

i would rather not be broke so i'm trying to get a real job. there is always weird pressure on youin whether things are going well for not going well. >> good afternoon and welcome to book tv on c-span2. this is our monthly in-depth program. this year we are doing a special fiction addition with best-selling authors. this month is mr. whitehead. we've referred to several of his books throughout the first half hour but i want to give you a full list for the intuition that is his first book in 1998. john henry days 2001. the colossus of new york 2003. apex hides the hurt came out in 2006. sag harbor 2009. zone 12011. the noble hustle, a non-

fiction book, 2014 and his most recent the underground railroad which won the pulitzer prize, national book award, et cetera. we want your participation in ouraw conversation. we have several social media sites can also contact. we've got facebook, twitter. booktv is the handle you need to remember. here is our e-mail address as well. we will begin taking your comments and calls in just a few minutes. what is the first line you

wrote in the underground railroad. one of the first words you put paper. >> it was the first time caesar approached cora about running north she said no. at the beginning and the end in the last couple of books have known the last line of the book before i started writing and i'm writing for that. i didn't have that with this book but the first line came very quickly when i was ruminating and organizing the book and survived the horrible ssprocess to actually get into the book. >> what's the vetting system. >> you write something and it's genius and two days later you don't know why you wrote it that way. in this case, first-line was

durable and sturdy and spoke about cora and stayed with me. >> from the underground railroad up the grave robbers, the negro became a human being, only then was he the white man's. [inaudible] >> that is from a section that takes place in the early part of the 19th century and has a doctor who's going to medical school, the takes an eccentric route through american history, the main storyline takes place in 1850. that was my cutan off for technology in certain slang and then there were certain side stories in the book for some of the supporting cast. in that section, doctor stevens who meets cora later in life as a young medical

student in the 19th century learning about biology and he needed cadavers so you digad them up. there's a healthy trade in grave robbing and schools would buy these bodies and people were going compete to find fresh cadavers. there were gangs and they would beat each other up there at the same graveyard. it's very liberal and talking about prejudice in bostonnt in the 19th century and uses that despite racial prejudice, despite the aspersions cast upon what folks in america, ironically when they used the section, these folks become

equal, these dead folks are elevated only in death to a level of equality and so one of the many uplifting moments in the book. >> did you know you're right about that when you started this book. >> mention the outline, yes, i knew georgia would be this dark, white supremacist state, a black utopia state and then i knew i wanted to have the opening be an overture of a slaves life so cora's grandmother, with all her for six pages from africa to middle passage to this plantation and i figured a typical slaves story and then move on to cora's life and it

seemed those short six chapters could beo a way to open up a world where cora can go so even though i had a strong structure, there are different auditions for those short biographical chapters, mabel, cora's mother gets hers, and, after certain sections i would think who should get them, after north carolina we meet the husband-and-wife team who has taken cora in his more interesting, what can martin's upbringing bring to the book, that sort of stage, what can nfl bring to the book so even though i do have a strong structure before i get to the process where the book takes you and those short sections are useful in terms of giving

voice to how the book was evolving. >> can you read the underground railroad as historical fiction? >> i think, if you are well-versed inn historical fiction and you will know that the section didn't actually i happen in 1815, i'm moving something from late 19th century, have the idea to make the underground railroad into something real and that was the idea i had on my couch many years ago so it's very conception is a fantastic element. it's not a straightforward historical novel which means i can do a lot of different things in the book, have these different alternative americas and i think a lot of the books power and conception comes from having a fantastic structure. but no, it was not a

historical novel, i take many liberties and i guess my motto when i was writing the book was that i wouldn't stick to the facts but i would stick to the truth, a larger american truth with different types of connections that i can make and move different historical conceptions around. >> did you visit these places in your research? >> the randall plantation where cora is raised and she's enslaved is my own creation. in doing the research, i have the latitude to make my own plantation and him pop culture i think a lot of us have that idea of a plantation that's really big, but you could be one of three slaves on a family farm. it could be a midsize plantation, you could be a

domestic slave in a townhouse in baltimore and so my own creation and it borrows from how plantations actually work but it serves my artistic need. in terms of visiting plantations, i was two thirds of the way through figured to do a real writer and do some field research i went to new orleans and i got on the two of us. i was the only black person on the duress and were going north and the tour guide is giving her spiel and this is a river road that would take youor down to the port city and it was very collocated. running a plantation wasn't just sitting on your porch

sipping mint juleps. you had to keep track of your accounts and the workers, obviously i'm not in a historically rigorous travelogue. i went to two places, whitney plantation which is the museum the slaves experience, it's great can you should go and for a fiction writer, it's sort of feeling the atmosphere of fear in my skin, the sounds ofun the insects, seeing the implements and in getting names, they would describe how they had various exhibits to how much slaves were sold, when people came, and for me i'm just writing down names and some of those names i got from the plantation are in the book, how much people were sold for, all that kind of stuff and we get back on the bus and go to

the next plantation which is probably seen in movies landed sort of that stereo typical, yes, if you want to have an antebellum themed wedding, i guess you can have a slavery themed wedding, they havee hotel rooms and i'm not sure if it still says on the website but it says if you want to break three from hotel chains you can stay here. get it so but writing a book about slavery and getting people's actual stories, coming across early 21st century irony about race and the absurd way we deal with racist sort of nothing compared to the actual stories of slavery themselves so it was a weird adventure and yes

i did go to some plantations for research. >> the tour guide, being the only african american on the tour, did the tour guide ignore you or spend too much time talking to you. >> neither. i felt neither under the microscope or ignored but i think it's really, she gives the same speech two times a day, hundred times the year and doesn't even think about it. then i think this is a lot about how we think about slavery, we don't necessarily think about day-to-day conditions for slave slaves, the complete vast array of dehumanizing apparatus for slavery, we don't examine our assumptions about what it costs in terms of people's families and people psychologies and so the same way she sort of gives her

speech about louisian louisiana plantation life, a lot of us don't think about slavery in that deep and thorough way to give us a complete understanding of it. >> this fiction is new to us here at cspan as well, and it became almost a month long read for a lot of my colleagues at cspan to read the underground railroad so i have some questions already one from our colleague deb davenport who just finished your book and she wants to know about the five ads for escaped slaves in the book. one is cora, are the others actual ads from newspapers? >> they are. the university ofar north carolina, digitized and have a great digital archive andwa they invited mee too speak so a going down and there and hopefully i can

express my gratitude to their digital archive and so when a slave runs away, what you do, you place a classified ad in the newspaper and, as a fiction writer electing people's voices, i like how people talk but i can't really compete with the runaway slave ads. they capture so much and so little space. the formats usually $50 for my slave who ran away for no reason at all, she has a downcast expression of course, burn on an arm from an accident, glassine in the vicinity of edmonton farm community so, what is that community. how did she get that burned.at how can, there's so many

levels of denial in the ad, i decided just to stick them in their, copyright laws being what they are, i can just put them in their and also when i was doing the research, i was struck at the observation and you don't have to be a farmer or a slave master, you can be a journalist working a newspaper or writing a classified ad and you are upholding the slave system, the enterprise, your part of the link in the chain that keeps the system going. your blacksmith and you make shackles but also you make the iron rams for the wheels for the cars that are taking cotton to the market, you're making nails for the houses that are popping up in these new economy towns and so when

i was researching i ended up thinking a lot about how vast the enterprise was with the blacksmith in the classified ads that had gotten there to broaden the idea or broaden our idea in the scope of the world of how vast the slave system wa was. >> you have a line in there, everybody is working for. eli whitney. >> yes, in the cotton gin, thent slaves of course, slave catcher, he's as much a slave to the system as anyone in bondage. everyone is propping it up, everyone is caught with this insidious grip. >> colton, did i misread this is there a sympathetic aspect to the. >> think he recognizes.

>> think i'm one of the ouwell-rounded compelling antagonists for my formidable protagonist cora and i think you should see yourself in the villains as it makes them three dimensional and recognizable. it makes them live. he's a terrible person, that's a terrible philosophy, but in the same way when cora is revealing her flaw, when you see his moment of weakness, how we recognize some and how he sees the world and if you can recognize that quality in yourself, that's what makes artwork. >> when you teach a class, you've taught at several universities overr the years, what are two things you want

the students to no. >> we have three months so people can write three stories or they can do something different.t. i teach a lot of undergrads but if you only write stories about 18-year-old girls from new jersey because you're an 18-year-old girl from new jersey, why not go crazy and write about a 22-year-old boy from pennsylvania. if you only write fantasies, try realistic stories and vice versa. you have three months with this sympathetic or semi- sympathetic workshop and audience, try these different stories. if you always avoid the first-person voice, try it, why do you avoid it? maybe it actually works for you and you have some sort of trepidation about stretching yourself, so that's one thing, your three months to fail and then pick yourself up and try something differentto and then i

think if you find an author that you really love and sometimes in teaching people who could be architects or engineers and bankers and then bringing them to people like lori moore or daisy packer or people who may not necessarily read once iu get out of school, if there someone you like, read everything by them. figure out why you are attracted to their work, what makes him compelling and then read ake lot find out what kind of writer you want to be and then find out what kind of writer you actually are. those are two kinds of things. the inspiring voices we encounter as refining our ownt voice are very important. >> was a hard for you to write your antagonist as a southerner. >> sure, no more than having

an elevator inspector but i'm a human being and i know people and you always wonder on your own knowledge of yourself, what you see in other people, what do you speculate about what makes other people operate, whatever small insights with humanity so if you have a big cast, if you have a small cast in the book, you're always finding yourself in different characters and finding places where different and hopefully to what you know about yourself and other people, making characters were not like you recognizable on the page. >> and another colleague at cspan has been reading all your books and tweeting about it, i think you've retweeted him a couple times, you had

questions from several books but i'll start with the intuition is, he wanted to know who was james. >> it's funny because the first thing i i think about, you write a book and is not yours anymore the above questions and academics have questions and so i remember when the book came out i applied to a college when someone asked me, so james, obviously that's based on, i was like no i just lived on for an avenue and that was the first name i saw. so james fulton is the inventor of the intuition a school inspection and the intuition is kind of steps into an's elevator and divine what's wrong with it so like using the force and hopefully the elevator inspectors in your community do it the right way but in my book the intuition is our sort of

insurgent force. i grew up in the 80s and went to college in the 80s and so that meant wars between the canonist and the multiculturalists and so it seems when i made my elevator inspector school to have a conservative and progressive war play out. the very multiculturalists fighting the establishment and james comes up with the sacred text and at this point either my book sounds good or bad through my description so let's go back to your first question. either this book sounds cool or it sounds totally stupid. and so i'm re-creating my own

feelings when ili was writing the book and that's my book. >> i literally have no idea what you just said. i'm sure the audience followed it closely. >> is sag harbor a real place. >> it is a real place on the tip of long island. the hamptons resort community for the past couple decades, and the town of sag harbor is nestled in this famous part of the hamptons, southhampton and there's an old whaling town mentioned inwn moby dick, a lot of the goods went from that part of long island into connecticut and starting in the 30s and 40s there were african american doctors, lawyers, teachers who started going out there, getting some

are places, they have some extra money and they start a little community. it was a safe place to go, bring your kids, spread by word-of-mouth, people from harlem are going in the 30s and 40s, and so, my mom started going out there in the 40s and spend my summers out there, i grew up in the city i would go every year until college so sag harbor the book was based on my adventures in sag harbor the town. >> in here you're right was there anything worse than a bigger kid playing keep away with your stuff, that dreary rehearsal for adulthood. >> benji is 15 and he's doing a lot of identity formation. he's figuring out where he is part of this community, where he deviates from his

community, he's a black kid or can he only like certain. he's figuring out what it is to be a person and a lot ofth that sort of weird identity battle continues as he gets older, that kind of psychological warfare that you're engaged in with your community and the world, when your teenager you sort of wake up in your an individual. >> what does it mean to be bougie. >> it's sort of like upscale class pretension and it means like you've made it, sometimes there's anxiety about making it, there's also embracing the fact that you're a little bit posh.

>> back to sag harbor. getting rid of your site house, that was unforgivable like selling your kids off to the circus. you still have your steakhouse. been livingom has out there since 1990 so she has hers, she owned it but what's lovely about the places that people have been going out there for generations and my grandparents and their peers bought plots of land and little houses and the kids grew up in them and then the grandkids spend their summers in them and of course, like any place in the world, the community changes and a lot of families used to go out there, live in michigan you and i can go out to sag harbor sea so your house and new people take neighborhood, people like this lovely piece of land

and then in the 21st century realize it's actually nice beachfront property and so it's more m integrated now. so it has changed from what it was when i was a kid and part of the book talks about that place and it's really sort of thisan moment before becomes part of the hamptons proper in a really sort of posh environment. >> what was your mom's reaction. was your dad still alive when sag harbor came out. >> my dad passed away a short time before, i'm not sure how much he would've liked it. my mom dug it. i wasn't sure how much my friends would like it, and then it came out and everyone from out there seem to embrace it. there's a character in the book and he said i hear i'm in

your book, but these like i heard them in your book and i said yeah, how come he you didn't have mee too the audiobook. he does voiceover work. i kept coming up with all my friends who were in the book and they say i hear a minute but number is really bothered, most people were in the book weren't moved to pick it up. >> if your mom read it, what was her reaction to this line, and again, this is a fiction book, but we were a made-for-tv family and when he called action we had our marks and delivered our lines like pros. the scripts were all thehe same, we had the formulas down. >> actually, that is not much to do withh my family but it does deal with pop culture and

their sort of talking about the cosby show and when the cosby show came out a lot of middle-class black people embraced it as finally being on tv, brownstone to parents or professionals and in many ways the first time we saw ourselves in that particular way on tv. pop culture is very important to the main character, it's how he filters the world so his relationship to the cosby show becomes away to talk about the lie behind the cosby show fiction and now we know bill cosby, his own life had}the separation between the television reality and how things actually are in the

world. whether you're talking the cosby show or road warrior or hip-hop, pop culture becomes away of filtering out the world in dealing with your own emotions. like i said, i had to saturate to make this really interesting. that section has nothing to do with my family which was a proud family of zombie movie watching folks. >> did the magazine really put in whenever black people were going to be on tv. >> sure. i mean in the 60s, 70s, jet magazine and weekly would have a run-up of a listing of any part person that was going to be on tv. it was so rare and so lovely that the black press would tell you when you were going to be on tv. >> we've talked foron an hour

and. >> your kicking me off. >> and kicking me off and more portly were getting america involved here, we will begin with a phone call from charles in albuquerque new mexico. charles, thanks for your patience. you are on with colton whitehead. >> first of all, you don't have to thank me for my patients predicates been wonderful, i really enjoyed listening to the show, not only your insightful questions, but colton opening up and letting us have a birdseye view into that magnificent brain of his and his creative process, i had the blessing of being friends with the person who won the national book award for poetry and he always talks to me about having to find the harvest time that sometimes there's days you have to get up and there's gregory knowing

how isow this character developing, does this character have a life of its own, do you want to crafted a certain way and then he was talking also about making sure you maintain the movement forward in the linear structure and things of that nature and also the beauty and difficulties in opening yourself up when you do historical novels, the fact that you have to take some creative license with what you're doing so that it does help in terms of story development, but still being true to what the story is, and my question has to do, there's been so much that he talked about that i just that was amazing and interesting and the story development, he's talking about he has this idearu and the structure, there's certain times where he gets bogged down and not knowing exactly where to go what he wanted to take something but he persevered and said sometimes you just have to write those pages down so my

friend had set about perseveringou when you have this daunting task aheadad of you and it can be overwhelming and maybe just crank out those two pages a day. >> let's hear what colton has to say. thank you for calling and. >> thank you. it is, it's worked, and some days you're definitely in tune with the project and everything coming together and then some days you're just struggling through paragraph and you can do one paragraph a day and that's a victory. a novel is a marathon so evenen that one paragraph is a lot. for my own way of keeping sane is if i can do eight pages a week that seems like a good accumulation. that's like 400 year, that's like a novel in my dorky way of thinking about it. and then some days you get up monday you don't feel like

working cc movie, read a book, maybe those pages are tuesday, wednesday saturday and sunday, but it could be one page or three pages each day but if i get eight pages, that keeps me sane and some days i wake up and don't feel like working and that's work. it doesn't use the same part of the brain but you are making progress. >> have you ever gotten mad at one of your characters. >> not mad, their sort of a mental scene and i remember writing it out and getting very angry, with respect to sag harbor, i was a little bit more removed from some of my

previous characters. sag harbor is very personal so i felt very wrong writing it and then writing about slavery , the new book that deals with institutional racism and more horrific aspects of america, i do get angry when i research and i can see when i'm writing it it's very separate. it's an act of creation, not an active grievance, it's not an essay, i'm trying to put things together so the eater can come. >> you've got a player in the underground railroad, homer. >> homer is a little, black boy. he is the assistant to the white slave capture ridgeway edand i think i waited until i was ready to write it and if i

had written the book ten years ago i would've over explained his psychology but my idea for him was that he's going to do what he wants. and so, he's the black assistant tour white slave catcher. he's been a slave set free and yet he still keeps hanging out with rich ray. i was really trying to eliminate the weird corners of the master slave relationship. there were slaves who upon being freed at the end of the civil war who stayed with her masters, who knew nothing else except the plantation and we can't really conceive of thatwh kind of psychology but it actually happened. there were slave masters maybe raised by a house slave who would swear that betsy's part of the family, i love betsy, she raised me, but of course

her family, her children and you have that psychotic denial of the slave master. and so they make a weird duo and hopefully in a different episode they do illuminate for us sort of a very odd dynamic. >> martin, erie pennsylvania. good afternoon. >> thank you. good afternoon. quick question. had you considered writing dram drama, either for stage or for media/cinema? >> thank you. >> i did, i went for harvard for undergrad and had a very conservative english departmentnt and one class,

american fiction after 1945 so i did study a lot of drama, i took classes in the african-american studies department, in the drama department, i didn't act anything dialogue and structure is very important in my work. in time when i have needed money, i think i thought i want to teach, maybe if i write a screenplay i can do that and just hang out at my house without having to get dressed and shower. if i leave my house to teach, then i'll get three pages and unlike the socks, i know how to write a novel and so end up going back to fiction but i think i grew up on tv and film and those medias are very important to me and have a lot of ideas from film. it comes from science-fiction

and horror films of the 1970s but i was a tv critic for a while. i can do fiction and nonfiction's but i don't really have the chops to leave those two genres. >> is the underground railroad being considered. >> usually my books have too many people to be adapted but this book has been embraced and we sent it to hollywood in various people looked at it and we got a call from a young filmmaker and had great ideas and was very jenkins who did moonlight and it hadn't come out yet but we sans early version of it. i had to interview him to see if i felt good working with him.

weirdly got the oscar and the contracts came through a week later so he was talking around and pitching folks and then amazon studios is going to do a miniseries of it. they are writing it now and we will see if it goes forward. dean is in monmouth junction. is that a new jersey? >> about 6 miles north of princeton. >> thank you. so you were kind enough to autograph mike copy of underground railroad at the schomburg center and i know that you and kevin young, was he a year ahead of you? real classmates? >> yes, kevin young is a nonfiction writer, dean, i'm

sorry were going to let you go. it's hard to interact with the delay appear new york. >> yes, and he is now, we started writing together, we knew each other as young riders in college, he was always the more professional one and i was more the soccer one, he always knew what he was doing and right out of college he had this book published and have the schomburg library, afghan american library in newew york city. >> from the author of bunk. >> yes, it just came out a few months ago about hoaxes ine america, the american way of conning the public and so we've always treated work, he's always been a very good reader, always very supportive and hopefully i've been that

person for him and it's great to see him have such a great year. >> richard from illinois, please go ahead. >> yes, hi. i was just asking how they come up with the underground railroa railroad, however they built an early homes, is quite interesting in that. >> yes, it was a social network in 1840s the locomotive is transforming america, it's a very powerful image and metaphor so there was a slave who ran away from his master, the master woke up the next day and he said himself, there's no trace of them as it's as if he disappeared on an underground railroad and that becamee the term for this network that would help slaves escape to

the north and it would be a person with the seller and they're hiding someone for a couple weeks till the coast is clear, maybe they're taking someone in your wagon, taking them several miles and handing them off to someone else, there were white people, black people all risking themselves, risking their lives to help them escape or the eastern seaboard routes, you could end up in indiana, massachusetts, new york and it was obviously not a literal train, when the book came out i did meet people who havewa gone for decades thinking it was a real train which of course is very impractical, we have a train in new york and we can barely keep that going, a tunnel from new york to florida is very

impractical. >> was their significance in the fact that the different underground stations, somewhere decorated beautifully, some were very utilitarian. >> there's a new york station with a white subway tile, some are roughly carved out iraq, some aret very grand and accommodating to the visitors coming through so is about finding different characters of train stations. >> bob in easton pennsylvania e-mail then, you have referred to your couch more than once, n.is that where you write and what is a typical day writing. >> a typical day of writing, i get up, take my son to school, come back home, i take the first nap today on the couch, start working, write a page, another nap, write another page have a snack and again one to three pages a day is a very good day.

i met the person that if i have a doctor.not one i feel like the whole day is shot so i go do something else but 3 - 5 days a week, eight pages a week is a typical working day and then i don't have a lot of hobbies, my only hobby is cooking soth around 338 figure out what to make for the family and when you cook like a couple hours then you have a sense of completion, reading novel is like two years so i think i like the sense of accomplishment you get from making some braised short ribs. you get thefa satisfaction ofsh sharing with people and not waiting 24 months.

>> i talk about my safety valve, some people go to cafés to work, i'd rather be able to make a ham sandwich, take a nap, he can't really take a nap in a café, if you leave the house mother so many what's the word people out there so i just in my little heart, keep focused. >> with your notoriety now because of the underground railroad, can you still be anonymous. >> i get recognized occasionally. since the book has come out of dunmore tv than usual and more magazine stuff, i i am

recognized in that sort of uncomfortable and some is looking at me i'm thinking to have food on my face, is my fly open and the microbe. they just recognize me. but it's nice, people say i'm teaching your book, i just read your book, i just gave it to my mother and i could be on some sort of taxicab is almost hitting me or something terrible to run my mood and then there's always nights remake someone who has taken the time to read the book and has a kind word. >> you are invited to the laura bush symposium fore renaissance riders at the white house. the washington post book editor at the time as to the question, how you felt about african-american section in the book store and you kind of didn't really give an answer but i was wondering if you had a more definitive answer about

that. >> sure. that was a while ago. yeah, you know i think orders, there was a long-standing polic policy, sometimes toni morrison will be in the afghan american section and not literature and ideally you're both. when i was in high school, i would go to the black section and just browse and you find some random person you never heard about like douglas, who is this guy, and you know it was a place to find books about your culture and i think it came out of a good idea in the 70s, but why would you have toni morrison and the black study section. they should be in both. i think now, i don't think, i think she's in book sections, i think my books are in both sections and it'sio not as big

of a weird segregation, it had a purpose another purpose isn't as much anymore. hi tina, you are on book tv. >> thank you. i would just like to tell this gentleman ima was raised in a suburb of philadelphia. we were never never taught that there was a variable with blacks and i just apologize to you that this is what you've experienced so sir, thank you for your work, it's wonderful and i appreciate all you've gone through. thank you. >> thank you tina, thanks for calling in and i'm glad that you grew up. [inaudible] fortunately a lot of the country isn't as lovely as itstu

terrible side and terrible part off human character and up determining so much of our history, but thanks for reading. >> you grew up middle-class, upper-middle-class in new york city. did you go through a lot? >> well it's called, it's prejudice based on the color of your skin, your zip code soe, yes, of course like most young black men being stopped by police, handcuffed, interrogated for being at the wrong block at runtime in manhattan, pulled over, i actually don't have a drivers license that there were these

black guys in the neighborhood in these nice car and you never know when that kind of episode will escalate into something lethal. i think black lives matter and what happened in ferguson created a conversation about policecof brutality and in my life we have those conversations and then we stopped. it's rodney king and then we stopped talking about it. and we talk about again and stop talking about it.lk so, whether there's this national conversation about it, it's part of my existence ever since i broke 5 feet and became seen as a target. >> review given the talk. >> the talk, sure, i think the first person to give it to me was richard pryor. he is a bit early 70s about being stopped by the police and it's like you know, why couple she even a second and when you go to show them your

license and registration in your passport, richard pryor says i am reaching into my glove, no sudden moves because you get shot in a second. so the first person was richard pryor and my dad later, whenever i left the house i was made aware that i'm a target and i can be shot at any moment. >> somfrom our facebook page, my question is did you always write such short but brilliantly descriptive sentences. yesterday i quoted you on my facebook page as an example of your scale. quote, tennessee proceeded in a series of lights. the boys had devoured the next two towns on the synder road. did you write them, did you hold it down to the core was that your original sentence.

>> thanks very much, that's nice of you to say. definitely, there is a narrator in john henry days, narrator. [inaudible] it has a rhythm to the sentence and much more compensated sentences than the narrator of this book so, you pick the right narrator for the job. i'm a concise mode right now with underground railroad, the book i'm working on now and i feel that's from trying different kinds of voices, trying different sentence styles, narrative styles, you exhaust one and move on to the next and try to invigorate what you've done before, and like what i seen before,be hopefully you get better at it.

you mention this new book coming up. when you tell us anything. >> it's too early but it takes e 1960s. aually i go with maybe funnier book and then a darker book and underground railroad has like the smallest joke. page of anything i've done. i think there's two jokes but this book is also sort of darker pain and maybe i should just mix it up by doing to dark books in a row and the next one could be a little wider. >> that's hear from ed in keokuk iowa. >> and west junior. can i call you colton or do you want called mr. whitehead. >> colton is fine. i told him i go and an extra room because i was watching and i didn't know if this was prerecorded but they said it was live.

i'm 73 and i've had books in my head for years since i've been in my 20s and i've had people tell me, my gosh, put it down in writing. well you know how it is, you get busy trying to make a life feed a family and you get distracted, but i wrote little stories and one of him when my mother was alive, she passed away last year at 9 92 and i was told i was gonna write about her because she had a powerful impact on me like her father had on her and the title is can have you call me mother, don't you call me mom and i was the only thing ever remember calling her because my dad, he always called her a nickname he came up with and i had older ladies that took me too church in the neighborhood and they said that's horrible.

whether you call her mother. every time i did she said you're pulling away from me. your closer to me when you call me ob. i thought maybe i was a adopted, but i would too much like her. >> ed has some books in his head. >> certainly. >> he 73 years old. he lives in iowa. >> if you wrote one story and you liked it, right another one. i teach undergraduates, i people teach people in grad school and i worked at summer workshops where it's all ages and people are in their 60s and 70s writing that first novel or an autobiography that they been carrying around and they finally have the time to go to it. this is my eighth book and i still struggle with when do i have time to find to work.

having a family, having a job, where you find those hours to get your story down, that's always a struggle whether you're a books andnd or starting your first story but no one else is generated for you. only you know who all the is and who she was and what she meant to you, only you can tell that story. the senior start, the sooner it will, be done. >> what's the biggest mistake first time riders make? >> realized my 20s that i have a lot of hot had friends who just write the first hundred pages over and over again.fr you can always revise later. you get to the and then fix it. don't get caught making the first hundred pages perfect. keep going, move forward, revise, move forward, revise but don'totot get stuck thinking it's not right.

get to the end in the end will tell you what's wrong with beginning. >> thatnn afternoon. >> i have two questions for mr. whitehead. the first is, when you areg, writing, who is your target audience and my second question is, is there any subject that is off-limits that you wouldn't write about? those are two good questions. i have my ideal audience member, he says i can write, this guy is a weirdo, i'm a weirdo, i think reading invisible man at an early age, here's this kooky dude, maybe i can write as well pardon the book came out and there was no

16-year-old kid in the audience, white or black and i stopped expecting who my audience is. i'm always gaining people, losing people, sag harbor, realistic, less hard to describe the my elevator inspector book, i got new readership and then i followed up with a book about zombies and lost all those people some always used to getting new readers, disappointing them and then i move on with my next book so i don't think about my audience anymore. >> the things i don't want to write about, i don't know much about football so it's unlikely that i will have my football novel, but as a matter of this taste and not taboo, i never thought i would write a book about the world series of poker but it sort of

fell in my lap, i think as you go through life, different things become more or less interesting to you so there's no way i could have predicted that i would've written a lot of my books. >> next call, david in georgia, good afternoon to you. you are on the air. >> yes, i just want to ask, haven't read any of your books, but about the african slave trade, i've just been reading the autobiography of henry m stanley and he described some when the arab traders came down to east africa especially and murdered 30 or 40000 villagers to get 5000 slaves. of course it was like there's buyers in the new world so to speak, in america so that's like the drug dealers now, if there's buyers, people supply the dogs or slaves so i'd like

your opinion on that. >> i have a section on the afton slave trade that opens with the book and then before i get to america and american slavery and so that's always written on the subject, but where there's money, people tend, when there's money involved, people tend to explore their worst impulses so there's obviously a lot of money in the african slave trade, there's money now, their stories about slavery is now whether it's wage slavery, building iphones in a factory or shrimp on a shrimping vote, slavery is just now in different forms. unfortunately money makes people doy several things. : -- stealing liz from long

branch, new jersey.please go ahead. >> caller: hi. my book is the intuitive. interpretations are all over the place. can you explain more about that and especially that the main character? >> guest: sure! the intuition is that book is very open and much more ambiguous than some of my other books. what does it mean? something in terms of elevator inspectors and in terms of technology. when i started the book i didn't think about it but before elisha otis invented the safety elevator you could only build up to five stories y so it enables

modernity. that is one meaning of the word elevator. sometimes it's about transcendence and achieving a higher consciousness or a higher level of being. so it is very open to a lot of interpretations. once i'm done with the book, it is yours to read, interpret and whatever thinking you have, have fun with it. >> host: whenever you are done with the book, it's yours. our conversation with colson

whitehead continues. here is how you get through. if you live in eastern and central time zones, eighth 201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones and we also have several ways to make a comment or ask a question. twitter, facebook, instead graham. remember@booktv. e-mail booktv@c-span.org. we will continue the conversation. colson to show you whitehead acceptance speech at the national book award. this is at 2016 right after the election we are going to show you influences and books he's

reading. >> like the make a wish foundation. the model for acceptance speeches is the oscars into the first and thefirst i saw was li. i never thought i would become a writer and ps one of t these things. and then robert caro. well done.

at home watching on screen if she didn't go to bed, you are 12-years-old. i started looking for da flippit you were born. [applause] i'm excited to find out. it's okay writing good books when you are unhappy. it's better writing better books when you are happy something you, love. [applause]

from oprah winfrey, got the word out and usually people read my copy like i don't know. oprah is like read it. this time last year i was finishing up a book and you never know what is going to happen in a year. the book is out and i never thought i would beou standing here. a year from now we are happy in here and outside is the blasted hellhole wasteland of trump but who knows what is going to happen a year from now.

because i am promoting the book it's like not really, i am stunned. i heard about something that ws making me better and i guess it was a decoy and everybody. ♪ ♪

♪ colson whitehead, in your speech you refer to the terror that is

trump land. >> guest: i grew up in new york so there was this tabloid buffoon teacher. so repellent in terms of the campaign season. he can say a flood of racist things and govern in a way that. consistently in overtime once he was created white supremacist

and if you say they were marching in charlottesville and raising nazi flags it as evidence of a certain sympathy. >> host: isabel wilkerson, one of the books that inspired you. >> guest: is a sort of captures the story of those moved to the north. my dad's family came from florida, out of town supposedly. when his father got into a fight and a. my mother's family is from

virginia. others gotot to newark and got f the train and they thought they were at new york penn station. that is how he became a new yorker. >> host: at some point in the i read your mother's family were freed blacks. >> guest: on my mothers side to send it from a biracial woman from 17 something she was half white irish, half black. those kids were free and married

a. >> host: does the invisible man holed up? >> guest: im in a sort of d concise stage. i mention that the revelation for me as a teenager and remember the first chapter that opens the book. at that point i waswa reading fantastic literature with so much absurdity in the opening scene i saw a kinship and it was important to me when i was

younger and still is that kind of inspiration. >> host: what did you get from allen ginsberg? >> guest: this american voice that is tragic, sarcastic, loving. i will be watching the videos and then three lines pop up and it's like he was a genius. it is a series of essays and hopefully it reaches that voice with ginsberg and walt whitman. >> host: from the underground

railroad, you write that the divine thread connecting all of the human endeavors if you can keep it it is yours. >> guest: people art objects and bought and sold and have a value placed on their lives and the more they work, the more they make money for the people that own them.

>> host: the next call comes from bill in new york. you are on booktv. go ahead. call to. we are going to have to lose bill. just a reminder, turn down your volume otherwise there is ais delay and it gets a bit confusing. let's hear from spartanburg. >> caller: hello, mr. white had. i wanted to know who was one of your favorite authors and what type of inspiration and when did

you know it was going to be your lifetime duty instead of as i say getting a real nine to nine to five job sex >> host: we are going to get an answer to that in just a minute but who is a writer that has inspired you and which have you read? >> caller: one of my most inspirational writers i am reading the book now the underground railroad. i am presently reading it now and enjoy every bit of it so it has been a treat to see it on tv today. >> host: what do you do in south carolina?

>> guest:th >> caller: i work for the hospital. i am a nurse, so i like to read. >> guest: i hope the end of the book is not disappointing. writers that have inspired me to. somebody from ralph ellison with twilight zone and artful comex and i wanted to write salem's lot or the shining. then i started reading samuel

beckett and these are people where i think my early love for the genre storytelling it is a tool you use it here or there. they are still presented in the same register. they came up with it on on the façade of bigger practitioners. his grandmother would tell stories about her village when she was growing up. makes sense to fantastic detail.

she presented with a space and you never knew what was real and whatth wasn't. if you read his book there were other a magic realists. there is a matter of fact merging between the two. when i was working on this book it was more science fiction and each was different in terms of time. how would tha it have served the storywh and so when they encounr these fantastic or absurd moments it is presented with a

matter-of-fact tone. now they are officially old. i thought that was funny. >> host: i would go to the harvard names. what kind of name is that.

i would go for a harvard dorm name. it's better than out here with us so for a lot of people they are first learning about other cultures and races so you are learning things for the first time and it makes you engaged.

but they are out here with us. >> host: you've mentioned depression and being sad at times yet your sense of humor comes through. >> guest: it is a part of wife and lifeand i think i mentionedt richard pryor earlier, george carlin. they are presenting this haperspective. there was a narrative voice that goes from the tragic to the

ecstatic to the universal and i think that we are a all moving o capture that in the book. i ca can't accommodate a part oy personality that is a little darker and that is part of me and i think everybody. is that the outline when you are putting this book together that it's going to be outrageous and then we are going to be third person? is it that specific? >> guest: i know it may be satirical and 50-yard choking. would be so brutal it wouldn't serve the fewer

jokes. i am not fully aware of the. i have two questions. one, is colson a family name and second, there were a couple of ways that enslaved people communicated too each other abot the underground world. one was through a song. was there any other way that they communicated to each other? >> guest: thank you, ma'am.

the first part ofhe the questio, colson is a family man. my name is actually arch. my father's name was archibald. colson is actually my middle name, my grandfather's name was colson and his father or grandfather worked in a hotel in virginia in a small town, bought himself out of freedom, they kept doing that and then he boughthat hebought his daughterf slavery in terms of

communication, if you were caught, you would be put to death. it was very clandestine and a lot of complicated ways. in my book she comes from georgia and we didn't operate thatin far south. he'd never make it to the carolinas, virginia. you could escape south to the caribbean, to mexico if you are that far south. there are so many different ways peopleutar communicated. and again if you were caught and jailed, beaten to death, strung up. >> host: houston, good afternoon. >> caller: thank you both for

this, i lovehi booktv. what if you write different genres how do you settle or how does the agent settledst with y? >> guest: for my friends that go to grad school for writing some of them dead and ascended and. i could sit down for five hours for some peace and decided i couldn't get paid to pay my rent a. i knew nonfiction writers, so it

was someone i knew. i got a recommendation from someone that tackled my first book. she recommended a new agent at that point and represented juno diaz. from the list she had a sensibility you can look now. in my case it is a paragraph and a description of the book.

you figure out who is representing books like yours.ti >> host: you have been talking about it and working on it for x. number of years. are you getting tired of it are getting bored? >> guest: i'm not getting the word orr tired. it is incredible. something i could never have dreamed up in a reception in terms of people who picked it up, endorsed it. it's one of those lifetime things. i am enjoying it and appreciating it. >> host: how do you find out that he won a pulitzer?

>> guest: finding out is not anti-climactic, but it is a live stream from columbia and its like really fast. the pulitzer goes to this newspaper and it isn't really theatrical. it's quick and sort of lifestream. my wife went to work and then they said my name, we met up with some friend's and the agent that we celebrate it. >> host: what was your friend's reaction to winning? >> guest: i had written two books and all of a sudden the check arrives in the mail. i think people do ask that the

expectations. itit was saying >> host: >> caller: appraised you receive from the "washington post" and the miami herald that you deserved it.

we would like a short overview of the harbor because you and i both come from newark new jersey and i am a curator of the underground railroad so go ahead and tell us what you can. >> host: was there a station? >> caller: it was right off of the ohio river and what was said is up to date. >> guest: it is a very important book for me. we started with intellectual questions.

i've been avoiding writing for the personal material and that book was important to me as a writer and have access to my personality and my world to put them out there. it started with a character as opposed to an intellectual question or character set and. since then, i think i've put more work into my characters and it's a culmination of two periods of my work. there's a strong character grounding it.

it was that earlier strain of an abstract premise and character work that comes together in this book so it is important for me as a writer and has received influence in this work. >> host: angela in warwick delaware. >> caller: i'm over here in the state o state of delaware am amazed how the gentleman writing this book. it is amazing. you have a sense

of humor and i am learning something from you. how did you get that last nameie of yours, is it like a slave last name or given to you because my father is also from barbados, from virginia that his fatherar was from barbados. how do you keep that sense of humor? >> guest: the name isn't from my barbados side, the family comes to new york, ellis island. talking about the book and my family history in virginia and

some form or someone sent me a genealogy that they didlo for me piecing together things talked about. this person traced it back to florida and georgia in the mid-19 centuries before that, i'm not sure. i know there were other people name whitehead. in'm terms of the writing it can only get better by giving it. i keep a sense of humor about my work and just try to keep going and keep getting their.

>> host: we are listening. >> caller: i have a question. how much should i accept a nonfiction book as factual, is there a writer's bias or can i rely on the facts? >> host: do you have a specific post you are referring to? >> caller: just in general. i like history autobiography. i accept the fiction as just a novel that may have some historical facts that i will give you an example. let's say in the bill o'reilly

book, the pacific war. how touchable is the bill o'reilly book? >> guest: strangely i don't read a lot of bill o'reilly, but i grew up in the 80s and there is no objective truth and perspective and political bias and social conditioning affects how you tell a story. if you write a history of slavery now, the interpretation is possible if you are writing

commodore cultural point of view trumps how the story is told and obviously it is a subjective account a of how useful things d your mom or cousin may disagree. so,, in terms of how much do you believe, there is the difference between the fiction of what iigo and nonfiction. people that read nonfiction and getting in trouble for the real and fake it don't you have a responsibility to your reader the answer is that i don't have a responsibility to the reader. i assume when the book says it is a novel is a piece of fiction

and should be taken as how it actually happened. i know people die every air when theyf start into tornadoes thinking it will take them to the wizard of oz, you shouldn't take fiction seriously. i know costa rica is where they filmed jurassic park and i'm afraid of dinosaurs and don't want to get eat-in but for most people, they don't have that problem and canat differentiate. >> host: you really won't go to costa rica are you serious about that? >> guest: i'm joking. [laughter] >> host: just wanted to check on that. is there significance in the fact that the protagonist just as the letter j.st for first na?

>> guest: i was trying to find different avatars throughout the decades. i will leave it at that. >> host: you said you do not feel a responsibility to the reader. to educate about history i think what has been nice if these experiments didn't happen in the 30s, 40spe and beyond.

in 1858-lite-it happened later. they had been moved to do more research. i have a responsibility hopefully not to bore people too much and have my books be worth their while. for family and friends as to be a good husband, father, friend. beyond that, if you think an advertising copy sounds compelling, pick it up if you don't think it sounds compelli compelling, pick it up. >> host: next p call from betty in tennessee.

we are listening. >> caller: i just called to gegive a message. i'm not even able to see well enough that he was talking about the way the things they used to get out, they used quilting, they wouldng quilt patterns to those used in the deep south. i am a white elderly lady and i'm not well-educated but i read a lot of histor history and i ha lot of love, i love people and i've always read a lot of books, black-and-white and god gave me a lot of love. this guy is interesting to watch. i haven't read his books, but that is something he needs to know, i have a paper that shows the different pattern if i can

find it again. >> host: before we let you go, can you tell us about yourself and if you were raised in tennessee and what it was like over the years. >> guest: i lived in georgia for about four years in different parts and that is when i realized this part was georgia and i met some sweet people i've never forgotten and i couldn't believeve the things that i have seen. i just couldn't believe it.

sitting on the front which rocking the baby, we can't do that they said. it was used in the deep south, certain clothes. >> host: thank you. >> guest: thank you for tuning in. the audio book is available. i can read the things i read if i factor them and i read the audio books for my short folks. it goes into a dramatic reading ofma a novel.

professional actors and i know that talking about tennessee and georgia it's very interesting since the book has come out in conversations in the south people would say it's going to be we are taking thi weird takie ssouth. then north carolina in my book as a white supremacist state and an exaggeration of what happen happened. >> host: but so do south carolina and georgia. >> guest: going there this week to toronto and greensbor

greensboro-five times since the book has came out. people come out to the event and it is a reckoning if you grew up on a piece of property and have family for generations how do you reckon in the fact. when i was researching a story i had to reckon with in many ways i should be here. the book that my great, great grandparents were not killed on this during a middle passage tor the book. no matter where you are coming from is an interesting reaction

when it came out in france and people connected to resistance getting people to safety. it has been interesting to see people react to different parts. >> host: do you enjoy the college lecture circuit? >> guest: i do. >> host: do you get anxiety? i >> guest: ianxiety? >> guest: if i'm doing something new for the first time, to start reading from my new book in the spring how people respond. i'm about two thirds of the way through the. are people laughing ate the jokes, are they falling silent at the terrible part?

and if you get a good reaction, people do understand what you are trying to do. >> host: without delving too far into the character, if you didn't sign up for the college lecture circuit, would you be essentially tethered to your couch? could you easily do that? >> guest: i work at home and i do spend a lot of time. going to do four in travel and going to tucson. it allows me to see a lot of different places and it's a good positive part of the work.

president obama praised underground railroad. did you have the chance to meet him when you were in? >> guest: i did. i thought someone was praying in mee again so i looked up his nae and he was a white house worker. i invite a bunch of novelists. he had been there for almost eight years instead he always wanted to chat with writers and have lunch with them and only had a couple of days left. time was running out, so we were sort of dazed by the news and

after 20 minutes he's likewise been up and we did lighten up. he had some great folks and got animated talking about being a book writer, writing his first book. there are some that would croak really loudly and he got animated just thinking about that thrill of creative actions. >> host: where were you writing your first book? >> guest: in brooklyn. i did some good books in brooklyn.

i would write another article in a couple of days and there were rooms with slanted floors. there were these really terrible apartments but that's what you do at this age. >> host: ginny in honolulu, good afternoon to you. >> caller: good afternoon. i would like to know if you are familiar with the writing of the italian who wrote in the 60s. his most famous work is the comics. it's not really a novel. each chapter is like a short story unto itself, but then i hear you laugh [inaudible]

also wrote i don't know how to translate that the baron in the trees or something. >> host: why is this appealing tohi you? >> caller: it's a magical realism. verye light languages, beautiful and so intriguing and the imagination. >> guest: he's great and those are both great books. again i felt a real affinity when i encountered his workwi in college from being someone who likes fantasy he was a so-called highbrow writer using the

storytellers that i adored growing up whether that is an c. clarke seven and got voice is really inspirational. the books are short. pick them up. >> host: is currently reading your comic book. >> guest: the last big comic sometimes if you go to the plantations is about 1985 and pop-culture and i re-created a bunch of mix tapes in comics.

it is about the corner of the dc comics world. >> host: david n. .-full-stop you're on booktv. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. one of the most interesting summers was in 2003.

it encourages the students to read. i'm only a writer becausee i loe reading a lot when i was a kid and it's not the stuff i was supposed to read, it was comic books and science fiction and i don't you write stories about zombies and robots and maybe want to write serious fiction, so it doesn't matter if it is twilight or hunger games, if you like it there are other books

taken in society. why do we read books, libraries and books sustain us a. a. there were 3,000 pieces and my

daughter, graphic novels are really big right now. if you're going to do the book reviews -- >> guest: i'm not sure where that is, but my website has the spring and perhaps i am coming to a town near you. ..

>> do you do bookselling? >> i do,. >> what is most common, people make to? i was most offensive,. >> is funny because definitely in europe there's a difference acquaintance or lack of acquaintance with african-american black culture, there's basic questions about the underground railroad and how it works. think questions like can a white person have written this book, cultural authenticity and you would never escalate person could a black person ever in the

book, can white people right outside race and that's a big question about authenticity is being framed in the way to do with my book it's like here next i like black person. >> these are questions you get with interferes? >> to get apologized a lot to the south. >> there people who are moved to apologize for some culture with their great-grandparents did not do. the most common question is about why female protagonists

been inspired by harriet jacobson mixing it up exploring the dilemma of the female slaves basically take the time i think the question is kelly down but to answer and engage. >> because of the underground railroad and your book have you become an african-american writer? >> guest: i think they're slim recognition people do want you to talk about plaque lives matter. we need someone to talk about it why not ask some of public lives matter to talk about it .-ellipsis novelists. my book is a spinoff of a lot of different topics.

obviously because things have changed contemporary political culture and natural into a conversation about a book. so my job to be the fourth seat on your talkshow. i really am a writer. >> missouri there's a caller. >> good afternoon. >> thank you for the fascinating interview. a few quick questions, are you familiar with the slave writings of william faulkner especially in the story the bear and using his stream of consciousness technique and then i will go down moses what you think about the postmodern novelist like william gass, john barth and

that school. >> what you think of them great? >> i think they're fascinating, robert cooper's post novel the executions of the 50s for the novel called the public burning william gavitt's from st. louis who just passed away at age 88 or something. fascinating novels like the tunnel and but interesting school of learning. >> thank you sir. >> i'm blanking on one of on. his message with me they don't

see him as an influence or have much use for him. i guess in terms of my work i remember reading the babysitter the first month of our freshman year in college is very important for me is one of the first writers i read in college and that i went out about the book that summer. so continue to study up on them. definitely did my time with the recognitions like with 800 pages and jr this sort of really distinctly american novels kaleidoscopic interpretation of

american culture. richard nixon is there is a character the rosenbergs and taking characters and having euros spin. >> from a profile view in the guardian in 2017 the parents ran an executive recruitment firm were less than delighted when he announced the desire to become a writer. >> my father grew up poor was first-generation college. he hoped that his children would not be broke. i spoke many times since i got out of college because of my career choice.

they're hoping for a long time i get a straight job and become a lawyer and then they realize i was in it for the long haul. >> is this your father and sag harbor can we read that this is your father. >> host: you kept changing the channel out of habit. cnn and the nightly news were the only thing you watch. to all the everyday heroes were parade of shifting masks prop seven idea like this souvenirs our friends and neighbors brought back across the atlantic, he saw the true faces beneath and called them up. he didn't need it teleprompter he knew his information by hard. the problem with black people is they waste time praying to god when they should be out looking for a job.

nobody ever gave me anything didn't ask for anything, some people need to get off their asses. >> had a conservative take a group very poor definitely in the last part think sadly the first part of that sounds like me and i become him. what i do. >> heavy talk thought about changing the channels? >> usually when i work i need to have six months but i became such a news junkie that i started working on a new book and it helped. i was off the tv news.

>> and have you remain sober? >> also days on back or something crazy happening. back i'm going to finish this book before our latest chambering charming round of news. i know people who are writing books like a drooling idiot did trump really say that, sis fascinating? i can open up national parks to drill for uranium. so i know people somebody finish my book before i got sucked into

the new cycle. >> host: kiersten is from new york city. >> caller: hello. thank you for taking my call. i have two questions. what you think about the use of the n-word today and the second is if there's a difference in his mind between stereotyping and racism, between any races or ethnic backgrounds? >> what is your answer to those two questions? >> i live in washington heights harlem as a white woman and we hear the n-word a lot. but god for bid if i let it slip it would be a big wrong. my personal opinion is that all vocabulary should be available to all people. i think stereotyping is a gateway towards racism or could be a mindset but there is a

difference if i hear somebody saying black people have a great sense of rhythm is that racism or stereotyping or is it a dangerous stereotyping? >> where did you grow up. >> caller: of the originally approved germany. >> thank you. can break down the differences between the stereotyping and racism. racism depends on negative stereotypes of people of different skin. misogyny and stereotypes about gender. xenophobia by people with other

cultures in terms of the n-word, someone is that with black culture for many years this i have filled to say who can and who can't use the in order, it's exhausting. it's tiring. if you're white person want to say the n-word why do you want to say it, why is it an issue for you when you spend time wondering obviously it's used in different ways, the way it could be used by women and men different ways in the context it's a consulting someone's brassy personality or massage this way of having a female personality.

think if you wonder if you can say it, don't you probably racist. >> this is an e-mail for marcia, how important your teachers and impacting your current literary success? >> i'm often asked about was their special teacher mentor who took a shine to. the answer is no. whatever singled me out for special treatment, i think about teachers i had mr. johnson introducing me to ralph ellison. so, nobody really took me aside and it's like your special, but they talked about great books

and the importance of that development as a writer. so think about reading the lottery for the first time i what that teaches us about to be introduced to this novel james joyce is a freshman in college when there's this explosive dynamic talent in ulysses. semi teachers introduced me to very important books that are still draw upon today. >> iris from southland michigan. >> hello i'm calling because i love your hairdo, it's really cool and peter read that quote by your father and i thought he went to my high school because we all thought the same way.

i lived in a mixed area we all got along. wheaton college other names. and a lot of people that graduated with me of color not color went on to really great pics. two of the officers from a graduating class for people of all color. nobody call me a dirty -- and i didn't call anybody another name. we live together in the same neighborhoods and got along great. i think this new racism is really ugly and i don't like the groups get together government to fight each other. >> what you mean by the new racism. >> caller: you have all the subgroups in our government they get together, groups of five or six in the get before microphone

and five for certain cause when it should be one person, one vote. there's no space speaking for their constituents, not for themselves. that's crazy this is america. >> it's not a racism, it's the manifestation of american darkness that goes back centuries. when obama was elected people would say about the society in fact does mike say -- in society because that happened and i think obviously the people who voted for obama 49% of the population for the for donald

trump and when you're talking about hate crimes on the rise talking about people not on ashamed to show their faces like their honeymoon where kkk max mask. were talking about the emergence of something that is been there i will continue to be with us for a long time. >> if you took out the references to race in sag harbor that could've been written by anybody. >> it's about becoming a teenager and your identity. to me it's about identity formation we all go through in her teens but i start my community end?

>> host: why did apex want to change its name? >> guest: apex is about a town in the midwest. they want to rebrand themselves so they hire -- who is the protagonist of the book and he names things like new antidepressants, band-aid named apex a band-aid that comes in different skin tones you can find your own skin color and not be ashamed or flesh tone band-aid. so branding they want to change the name of their town for the branding the same way neo-nazis and -- are branding themselves as the outright. you want a new image have a new

identity for yourself, it starts with the name. >> what name are considered? >> the main character's face with the essence of american history how can the new name of the tongue capture were winthrop is going where it's been have a duty to tell the truth or to have this new identity and it comes to a genius adventure and comes with a solution. not necessarily going to look great on t-shirts or science but his solution to the problem.

>> you are on book tv. >> hello and you have my name correct what i wanted to ask the question think what i've been listening to the program they have work that has some humor in your work but have you thought about writing something purely humorous like a satire on some serious subject like slavery or lynching or the civil rights with jim crow possibly. >> i think some of henry day does deal with different moments of black history i think humor is a useful tool. is it right for this story are

not the most purely comic book is the noble hustle i certainly had a lot of fun writing it the first line is i have a good poker face because i'm half dead in side and either you find that funny or you don't. in the part of that weird miserable humor or not. i think that sums up where it's coming from and that book. >> host: anita from madison wisconsin. >> hello. i have a question, i'm a librarian but never quite retire. i want to know the books that were important to you in middle school and high school. >> was a high school senior i

had a call english teacher who had a class of fabulous him. we ran -- progress, the old british story about going to story with adventures and that template the odyssey and then solitude introduction to -- highs in this book. earlier think stephen king some

interesting structure. a story of carrie and her high school in town interspersed without newspaper accounts of the carnage that carrie unleashes. as for shadowing in the text outside the main text. i remember thinking you can actually play seventh grade -- in that way i remember thinking that by reading stephen king scary. >> did you ever have trouble naming your main character. >> mark fits he of course 18, nine, ten metals in the 70s olympics for swimming, in my

book he cannot swim so ironic name. >> barbara in virginia beach virginia, hello. >> thank you for taking my call, a fascinating interview. i'd like to ask colson if he admires or likes the work of walter mosley, a wider i very much enjoy, he's versatile like himself in terms of genre. and also someone who can talk about being a black man in modern america, thank you for taking my call. >> thank you for calling in. walter mosley is great.

as i was trying to find a model to become a better writer i was reading a lot of detective books it was a great couple months of my life studying the conventions of success how to bring and raise because of walter mosley and i was fortunate when the intuition is was finished they sent it out to people for blurbs and walter mosley was very kind and gave me three sentences to endorse the book when the book came out people would say about your book because of walter mosley. so as sweet of him to take the time. >> and walter mosley will be sitting in a chair during our

special your fiction authors. he will be there in two months. we have time for a last call for nancy in georgia, go ahead. >> good afternoon. you are real refreshing breath of fresh air. to know of the work of charles from the 1890s in chicago who wrote the conjure woman. i wonder if you know about is fiction? >> guest: i do. the english department in college was very conservative and that's where he first came across slave narratives and charles, very early black fiction writer.

it's a great has a great grouper. it was black southern slang for magic so someone through -- dust in your eyes you would be bewitched. it was kind of a crazy word and i was lucky i was able to use the word in the underground railroad and talking about there is slave masters with higher people which is to make a heck surround their plantation that would prevent slaves from running away so people would be afraid to run away because they were cross this magical line and be sickened by this bad magic.

i assume the magic didn't work. >> host: pulitzer prize winner national book award winner, macarthur grant genius. colson whitehead.com is the website he's been a guest on depth. here's a list of your books, intuition is, john henry days follow the colossal of new york, apex hide the hurt in 2006, sag harbor 2009 zone 12011 the noble hustle by playing poker came out 2014 and finally, the pulitzer prize winner, the underground railroad in 2016, a new book is

that when? >> next year hopefully. >> thank you for spending three hours with their audience. >> thank you for tuning in america. >> c-span, where history and pulled staley. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies. today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court in public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to by your cable or satellite provider. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2. next up a book party fores