Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager in Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1960s, is being raised by his grandmother Harriet on beans, ambition, and a treasured recording of Martin Luther King Jr. at Zion Hill: throw us in jail and we will still love you. Offered free college classes, he hitches a ride toward them — in a car that turns out to be stolen — and is sent, though innocent, to the Nickel Academy, a reform school where the races are segregated, the labor is unpaid, and discipline is administered in a whitewashed shed the boys call the White House, from which some never return. There he befriends Turner, a wised-up orphan who believes the world is crooked and survival is the only curriculum; the novel is built on the tension between Elwood's King's-eye faith that suffering can be answered with dignity and Turner's certainty that it cannot. Whitehead's Nickel is the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys of Marianna, Florida, which operated for 111 years before closing in 2011, and whose unmarked graves — unearthed by university researchers decades later — frame the novel: when the past is dug up, the survivors' buried story comes with it, closing in a revelation that reframes the friendship at the book's center. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2020, Whitehead's second in four years.
Author: Colson Whitehead · Original publisher: Doubleday (New York), 2019
