Harlem Shuffle Study Guide

Colson Whitehead was raised in Manhattan, where he attended Trinity School. After graduating from Harvard University in 1991, Whitehead wrote reviews for The Village Voice. He has written 11 book-length works, nine of which are novels. Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist (1999), is a work of speculative fiction featuring elevator inspectors and racial allegory. His work has received many honors; most notably, his novel The Underground Railroad (2016)—an alternative history set in the Antebellum South—won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and the National Book Award. His next novel, The Nickel Boys (2019)—based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida—won Whitehead a second Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Kirkus Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Additionally, Whitehead acted as executive producer on a film adaptation of The Nickel Boys, which was released in 2024. His most recent novel, Crook Manifesto (2023), is a follow-up to 2021’s Harlem Shuffle, following furniture salesman Ray Carney. Whitehead’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s, and Granta. He has received both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, Wesleyan University, New York University, and the University of Houston, among others. Whitehead lives in Manhattan with his family.

Seneca Village was a community of free Black landowners established in 1825 in one of Manhattan’s boroughs in New York City. At its peak, the community boasted approximately 225 residents, two schools, and three churches. In 1857, the villagers were forced off their own land in order to make way for the construction of Central Park. As mentioned in the novel, the Harlem riot of 1964 took place from July 16 to July 22 of that year. The unrest began after an NYPD Lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan (who was off-duty at the time), shot and killed James Powell, a Black 15-year-old student, after a disturbance. Although Gilligan claimed Powell threatened him with a knife, witnesses disagreed and condemned the police officer’s actions as murder. The days following Powell’s death saw increasing tension between protesters demanding police accountability, including the Congress of Racial Equality, and the officers stationed nearby to control the demonstration. On July 19, protesters marched on the police precinct and the scene quickly devolved into chaos. Demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails, fought with the police, and looted numerous stores in Harlem. After three days of destruction and violence, approximately 144 people were injured, one person was killed, and 465 people were arrested. Additionally, 541 local shops were looted with damages costing up to $2 million. Gilligan was cleared by a grand jury two months later.

Readers who enjoyed Whitehead’s vibrant Harlem and crooked characters should check out Crook Manifesto (2023), the second installment in the saga of Raymond Carney. S. A. Cosby’s novel Blacktop Wasteland (2020) similarly explores the tension between the desire to make an honest living and the apparent need to resort to crime to attain financial stability. For an adjacent perspective on New York City during the tumultuous 1960s, James McBride’s Deacon King Kong (2020) examines a violent crime in south Brooklyn through the eyes of community members. For readers interested in crime from a detective’s perspective, Walter Mosley’s novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), follows Black war veteran Easy Rawlins as he investigates a disappearance while navigating the racism of Los Angeles in the 1940s. Chester Himes’s classic noir Cotton Comes to Harlem (1964) is sure to satisfy readers who enjoyed Carney’s intricate schemes, as it contains both a heist and a double-cross. Though it is set decades earlier, in the 1920s, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) dives deep into experiences of colorism within the Black community in Harlem. Finally, for readers interested in characters whose selves are divided between social propriety and immoral impulses, Whitehead himself cites Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) as inspiration for Carney’s character.