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Campus Read Books Available At Pius, Medical Center and Law Libraries

The 2025 St. Louis Literary Award programming will be kicking off with the Campus Read novel, Colson Whitehead’s  Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Underground Railroad.”

The Campus Read is an opportunity for Saint Louis University students, faculty and staff to read a specific work by the incoming St. Louis Literary Award recipient and take part in related activities connected to the book and author.

Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead. Photo by Chris Close. 

In addition to the Pulitzer, “The Underground Railroad,” won the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal for Fiction.

In Whitehead’s conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. As Whitehead re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. 

Copies of “The Underground Railroad” are now available for free to the SLU campus at the patron desks of all of the University Libraries for SLU community members. 

Whitehead will receive the St. Louis Literary Award from Saint Louis University in a ceremony slated for April 2025. He is also the author of the novels “The Intuitionist,” “John Henry Days,” “Apex Hides the Hurt,” “Sag Harbor,” “The Nickel Boys,” and “Harlem Shuffle,” among others. 

Whitehead has been a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Faulkner, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award and has received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

St. Louis Literary Award 

The St. Louis Literary Award is presented annually by the Saint Louis University Libraries and has become one of the top literary prizes in the country. The award honors a writer who deepens our insight into the human condition and expands the scope of our compassion. Some of the most influential writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have come to Saint Louis University to accept the honor, including Margaret Atwood, Salmon Rushdie, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Saul Bellow, August Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Zadie Smith and Tom Wolfe.