Colson Whitehead discusses career in Mt. Lebanon Library talk
MT. LEBANON – Ever since Irish actor and singer Richard Harris scored an oddball hit with “MacArthur Park” in 1968, people have been trying to figure out exactly what the song means.
You remember – the cake being left out in the rain, the sweet, green icing flowing down, and not being able to take it because it took so long to bake it, and you’ll never have that recipe again?
Colson Whitehead has his own playful theory about what the song is about. He thinks it’s about the rejection and setbacks that creative people endure as they pursue their craft, writers most definitely at the top of that list.
“Why did you leave my cake out in the rain?” Whitehead wondered during an April 26 talk at Mellon Middle School in Mt. Lebanon after playing an excerpt of Donna Summer’s disco version of the song.
Nowadays, no one is leaving Whitehead’s cake out in the rain, and he’s not papering his walls with rejection slips. The 53-year-old New York native is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner in the fiction category, taking home the honor in 2017 for “The Underground Railroad” and in 2020 for “The Nickel Boys.” Whitehead is only the fourth writer to win two Pulitzers in the fiction category, joining William Faulkner, John Updike and Booth Tarkington in that pantheon. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2020 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and, this March, he was the recipient of a National Humanities medal.
Whitehead appeared at the school as part of the Mt. Lebanon Public Library Speaker Series. Whitehead recounted the path his career has taken since he started as a television critic for the alternative New York weekly The Village Voice in the 1990s, to the pending publication of his latest novel, “Crook Manifesto,” which will be arriving in July. Since his first novel, “The Intuitionist,” in 1999, Whitehead has hopscotched through genres, dealing in history, science fiction, zombies and crime. His talk was peppered with pop culture references, ranging from “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” to “The Golden Girls” and the movie “Ocean’s Eleven.”
He said the idea for “The Underground Railroad,” which has an enslaved woman fleeing the Southern United States in the 1850s on a literal underground railroad, first came to him shortly after his first novel was published, but he held off writing it until he could “pull it off in a technical sense.”
What’s over the horizon for Whitehead? After “Crook Manifesto” is published, he’d like to try his hand at a romance set in the days of the French Revolution and a science fiction work incorporating characters from “Star Wars.”
The time since his breakthrough with “The Underground Railroad” have been “a time of great division in our country,” Whitehead said. “I’d like to think that the world is getting better for my children. Despite all evidence to the contrary, you keep hoping.”