The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead reimagines the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad beneath the Southern soil, following a young enslaved woman's harrowing escape north.
Where The Underground Railroad keeps showing up
Three of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Underground Railroad
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Cora is a teenage enslaved girl on the Randall cotton plantation in Georgia when fellow slave Caesar tells her about the underground railroad and asks her to run with him. In Whitehead's novel the railroad is a literal network of tunnels and trains, and each state Cora reaches is a new America.
Yes. The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. Colson Whitehead later won a second Pulitzer for The Nickel Boys (2020), making him one of only four authors to win the prize twice for fiction.
Yes. Amazon Prime Video released a 10-episode adaptation in 2021, directed by Barry Jenkins. The show is widely considered exemplary literary television and was nominated for many major awards.
The Underground Railroad is 378 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 Underground Railroad takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Underground Railroad is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Underground Railroad is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
