Colson Whitehead made his debut in 1999 with the publication of his first novel The Intuitionist. At the time, the country was in the middle of a Y2K meltdown, Whitehead introduced us to Lila Mae Watson, a black, female elevator inspector under investigation after one of the lifts she inspected has failed. Lila Mae, a one-woman arsenal, would test an all-male corporate authority, teeming with integration angst, in search of the perfect black box, the elevator that would lead the people to the future—to freedom, or, at the very least, a kind of freedom. If there was a glorious future ahead for us on the other side of the Y2K bug, Lila Mae was getting us there.

Whitehead promptly garnered critical praise for the novel with comparisons to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. GQ enthusiastically called it one of the “most emphatically favorite works of fiction from the new millennium.” Just two short years later, when his second novel, John Henry Days, was published novelist John Updike would properly crown Whitehead in his review for The New Yorker: “The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead."

Whitehead’s awards would rack up as quickly as his novels. Though not yet enjoying the commercial success of his contemporaries, Whitehead was a household name among literati yearning for the same critical attention. Following a Whiting, a MacArthur, a Young Lions and a Guggenheim as well as becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Whitehead’s legacy seemed cemented. Whitehead could be called a writer’s writer, deserving of the awards and adulation. Have better flashbacks been written than Colson’s account of New York before the zombie apocalypse in Zone One? I would argue no, not since James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” where, till this day, we can still see those guitar strings flying. Is there a more dry, acerbic yet wholly captivating voice in contemporary fiction right now? Whitehead’s fiction is more expansive: sprawling, capricious narratives coupled with a lived wit: one that’s seen and knows too much.

The arrival of Whitehead’s eighth book, The Underground Railroad, came with the backing that changes a writer’s life. More powerful than an Updike seal of approval, Oprah Winfrey’s sticker is on the cover of Colson’s latest, marking it the newest installation in her relaunched Book Club 2.0 series, an endorsement so grand that production was moved up by a month. Through Oprah, the Oracle of American media, Whitehead has finally arrived at commercial glory. Last week, the book debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

In The Underground Railroad, the MacArthur Genius once again centers a black woman’s narrative, something he hasn’t done since The Intuitionist, but this time we are in 1800s antebellum Georgia following Cora, an enslaved teenager, out of the everyday horror that is her young life, on the most fantastic vehicle: an actual underground railroad, complete with cars, stations, and conductors. Disturbing and arresting, The Underground Railroad is Whitehead’s magnum opus: charged with the same fantastic leaps as The Intuitionist and John Henry Days while taking the imaginative risks of Apex Hides the Hurt and Zone One but written with the economy of The Colossus of New York. The Underground Railroad is Whitehead’s conclusive and cruelest statement on the realities of black labor and American industry. The culmination of two decades worth of creative work from a writer strangely billed as a post-race thinker, The Underground Railroad is nothing short of an indictment on post-racial theory.

Whitehead and I met last Tuesday at Frankie’s, a popular Italian eatery in the West Village. He waited for me at the bar, black leather messenger bag dangling from one shoulder. His pink and navy, ‘70s inspired patterned pants were the perfect compliment to an otherwise humid day, the right amount of whimsy and cool I’d expect from a writer I’ve been reading for the last seventeen years, from the man who,instead of making a big deal about the first black president being black, waxed about him being skinny. Our cappuccinos arrived, Whitehead pushed his round, navy keyhole glasses toward the bridge of his nose, and our interview began.

GQ: So are you waiting for Frank Ocean’s album like the rest of the world?

Colson Whitehead: [Laughter] Actually no, I don’t know his work that well.

That’s actually hilarious. So you’ve never heard Channel Orange?

I heard a few songs on his last album that came out but didn’t really connect with it.

Speaking of Frank Ocean, I’m wondering about your thoughts on reclusive artists like Beyoncé, D’Angelo, and Kendrick Lamar dropping albums at midnight. How do you feel that translates into how we receive the art versus having that a set date? By moving your publication date up a month you kind of Beyoncé-d the scene by popping up with the Oprah announcement on a Monday.

They wanted to have the surprise. Oprah’s picks require months of planning. It’s a physical object. It’s not something you can download and stream, so you’ve got to get the printing plant to be quiet about the Oprah stickers, [as well as] all the bookstores across the country, so it’s just a much different operation than some of these digital projects. You can dump an ebook at midnight. You can’t dump a physical book. I think everything is so over-blogged before it comes out and overanalyzed to death. It’s nice to have a surprise every once in awhile, and especially if you’re a fan, you’ve been waiting to get that tweet or whatever tells you that the new thing you dig is on its way. It’s exciting.