Critical reception
The novel received positive reviews from critics.[11][12][13][14] Reviewers praised it for its commentary on the past and present of the United States.[12][14] In Books in the Media, a site that aggregates critic reviews of books, the novel received five out of five stars, based on four reviews.[15]
In 2019, The Underground Railroad was ranked 30th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[16] The novel was voted the greatest of its decade in Paste and was third place (along with Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad) in a list by Literary Hub.[17]
Honors and awards
The novel has received a number of awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[18] and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.[19] The previous book to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book prizes was The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx, in 1993.[18] While awarding the Pulitzer Prize, the committee recognized Whitehead's novel for a "smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America".[20] The Underground Railroad was also awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature[21] and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence,[22] and was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.[23][24] When The Underground Railroad was published in the United States in August 2016, it was selected for Oprah's Book Club.[25][26]
On August 5, 2020, a crater on Pluto's moon Charon was named Cora, after the character in the novel, by the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature.[27]
