The Nickel Boys
Tallahassee, the early 1960s. Elwood Curtis is a quiet, studious Black teenager who has memorized Martin Luther King's speeches from his grandmother's record player and is on his way to take a free college course when an innocent ride in a stolen car puts him before a white judge. He is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a state reform school that promises to make boys honorable and instead sends them, when they break the rules, to a building called the White House and, when they break worse, into shallow graves on the property. There Elwood meets Turner, a wary cynic who has decided the only way to survive Nickel is to keep his head down and never trust the version of America that Elwood still believes in. Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel, drawn from the real history of the Dozier School for Boys, won the Pulitzer Prize and is one of the great American novels of institutional violence and survivors' silence.
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Elwood Curtis is a careful, Martin Luther King-listening Black teenager in 1962 Tallahassee, on his way to take college classes, when he hitches a ride in a stolen car. He is sentenced to Nickel Academy, a Florida reform school where boys go behind a building called the White House.
Yes. The Nickel Boys won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Colson Whitehead also won the 2017 Pulitzer for The Underground Railroad, making him one of only four authors to win the prize twice for fiction.
Yes. The Nickel Boys is fictional but built around the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida, a brutal reform school in operation from 1900 to 2011. Excavations on the school's grounds have uncovered dozens of unmarked graves.
The Nickel Boys was written by Colson Whitehead, published in 2019 by LGF.
The Nickel Boys is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Nickel Boys takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
The Nickel Boys is a standalone novel by Colson Whitehead, not part of a series.
The Nickel Boys is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
