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>> The recipient of the Library of Congress Prize For American Fiction for 2020 is Colson Whitehead.  ^M00:00:40 ^M00:00:45  
>> Well, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction has always been a very diverse and very surprising prize. We went from Isabel Allende to Toni Morrison.  We've been from Marilyn Robinson to Dennis Johnson.  And we are so right at this point for Colson.  
>> You guys told me a little while back, and I'm glad now I can finally email it to my mom and make it official. So it's very lovely to me.  
>> Colson was born in Manhattan, started his career in journalism and in the last 20 years since his 20s has written nine superb, highly acclaimed books.  
>> My perfect day when I was a little kid was staying home reading comic books, Marvel comic books, watching Twilight Zone reruns and reading Stephen King. I remember reading the first chapter of Invisible Man in seventh grade, and I remember just thinking, oh, here's this weird black guy Ralph Ellison.  I don't know what the story is about. It's crazy. But if he's doing it maybe I could do it. 
>> Colson's one of the sort of rare writers who doesn't have a trajectory, if that makes sense, in that he doesn't sort of start with this kind of book and then write better and better versions of that book. He writes a very different book every time.  
>> My race, my American-ness, my New Yorkness, you know, define how I view things. They're one of the -- you know, one of the many lenses through which I view the world, and they inform my work. Race functions one way in Sag Harbor which is about being a teenage black kid in 1980s differently than in Underground Railroad, which steps back to examine slavery and institutional racism and how an attitude towards blackness, white supremacy has defined our country. And so if I can find different ways of talking about race or history and the city, I think I'm doing my job ^M00:02:43 ^M00:02:50  
>> With the Underground Railroad, Colson went somewhere where he had never been before.  
>> The underground railroad was -- it changed everything.  
>> I love using primary documents.  With Underground, it was slave narratives and the WPA's interviews with former slaves.  And they gave me a language of slang, nouns that I can use to make my book realistic.  
>> Probably the hardest thing to do in fiction is to actually inhabit another mind and another body and another sensibility. That really is the mark of an extraordinary -- a literary master. And he's there.
>>  Without hope, you can't go on. And without people standing up, nothing gets done. ^E00:03:36