"ESSENTIAL TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE AMERICAN PAST AND THE AMERICAN PRESENT"

WHITEHEAD, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, (2016). Octavo, original cream and black paper boards, original dust jacket. $950.

First edition of Whitehead's National Book Award winner, boldly signed on the title page in the year of publication by him with his date of "9/14/16."

Underground Railroad is "a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery… Whitehead has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present" (New York Times). "Imagine a runaway slave novel written with Joseph Heller's deadpan voice leasing both Frederick Douglass' grim realities and Lovecraft's rococo fantasies…and that's when you begin to understand how startlingly original this book is. Whitehead continues the African-American artists' inquiry into race mythology and history with rousing audacity and razor-sharp ingenuity; he is now assuredly a writer of the first rank" (Kirkus). Awarded the 2016 National Book Award, this is "literature at its finest and history at its most barbaric. Would that this novel were required reading for every American citizen" (Publishers Weekly). First edition, first printing. This copy contains four laid-in color photographs of Whitehead at the book signing.

A fine copy.