Lindsay Johns

Colson Whitehead celebrates old Harlem in a hardboiled thriller that’s also a morality tale

Harlem Shuffle vividly evokes the hoodlums, drug addicts and prostitutes who haunted the district’s rundown tenements in the early 1960s

Colson Whitehead. [Getty Images]

For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place both in the psychogeography of New York and the soul of the nation. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin and Chester Himes are just a few of the writers whose names are associated with the 50-odd blocks heading uptown from 110th Street at the northern end of Manhattan.

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