Colson Whitehead was born in Manhattan in 1969. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, book, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. He published John Henry Days in 2001, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York, a book of essays about the titular city, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of Apex Hides the Hurt, and this year's Sag Harbor. His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Harper's and Granta.