Tools
The underground railroad : a novel
- Author
- Whitehead, Colson, 1969- author.
- Title
- The underground railroad : a novel / Colson Whitehead.
- Format
- Book
- Edition
- First edition.
- Published
- New York : Doubleday, [2016] ©2016
- Description
- 306 pages ; 25 cm
- Contents
-
- Ajarry
- Georgia
- Ridgeway
- South Carolina
- Stevens
- North Carolina
- Ethel
- Tennessee
- Caesar
- Indiana
- Mabel
- The North.
- Summary
- Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey -- hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.
- Subject headings
- Underground Railroad--Fiction. Fugitive slaves--United States--Fiction. Fugitives from justice--Fiction. African Americans--Social conditions--History--Fiction. United States--History--19th century--Fiction. United States--Race relations--Fiction. Southern States--History--19th century--Fiction.
- Genre heading
- Historical fiction. Fiction. History.
- ISBN
- 9780385542364 (hardcover) 0385542364 (hardcover) 9780385542371 (ebook)