Colson Whitehead is one of the most acclaimed and awarded American writers at work today. To date, he has won the National Book Award, two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant. Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969 and graduated from Harvard University in 1991. During the 1990s he worked as a journalist for publications such as The Village Voice before publishing his celebrated first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999.
After writing three more novels in the 2000s, Whitehead published Zone One in 2011. Notably, the work combined elements of genre literature—science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction—with the style of literary realism featured in his previous novels. In an interview with The Atlantic, Whitehead revealed that he had grown "up devouring horror comics and novels... and always knew [he] was going to write a horror novel."
The novel quickly became a New York Times Bestseller and received a positive reception from critics. Writing for The New York Times, critic Glen Duncan called it a "cool, thoughtful and...strangely tender novel." Likewise, Ron Charles, writing in The Washington Post, singled out the novel's "grim comedy and desolate wisdom about the modern age in all its poisonous, contaminating rage." Many critics noted that the topic of the novel coincided with a resurgence of the zombie genre. For example, the hit television program The Walking Dead premiered the year prior to the release of Zone One.
Nearly a decade after its release, Zone One received attention in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whitehead's description of a plague that massively disrupted society and caused so many deaths gained new resonance during a real-life pandemic that did much the same. In 2020, the novel was included on a list of novels about pandemics compiled by The New York Times. Later that year, writer Rasheeda Saka made the case in an article for Lithub that "the novel feels insightful, and even prescient, today."
While Zone One is an undeniably bleak and troubling novel, it is a testament to Whitehead's literary vision and power of imagination that it continues to have resonance in the present moment.
