The fiction prize went to Whitehead's Underground Railroad, a novel that was 16 years in the making. As Whitehead told Fresh Air's Terry Gross earlier this year, his idea was born first of a childhood misunderstanding: that the Underground Railroad was, in fact, a literal locomotive.
He nurtured that idea into his adulthood, turning it into an exploration of the United States. The novel traces a slave's journey to freedom as a kind of American Gulliver's Travels, "rebooting every time the person goes through a different state," Whitehead told Gross.
The nonfiction prize went to scholar Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.Kendi's comprehensive study finds the threads of racism as they wind throughout U.S. history and traces them from their origins. Even as he delved deeply into some of this country's bleakest moments, Kendi said in his acceptance speech, he kept his belief in that country and its people.
"I just want to let everyone know that I spent years looking at the absolute worst of America, its horrific history of racism," Kendi said. "But I never lost faith. I never lost faith that the terror of racism would one day end."
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