Sutter, runs on a parallel track with a narrative retracing the life of John Henry - who, according to the famous ballad, died moments after winning a steel-driving contest against a steam drill. Sitting in a quiet coffee shop near his Brooklyn home, Whitehead explains that he constructed his new novel so that the story of his modern protagonist, a young black journalist named J. But in Whitehead’s novel, that simple small-town celebration is transformed into something far more complicated - and tragic. The novel’s title refers to an actual 1996 festival in Talcott honoring the release of a John Henry stamp by the United States Postal Service. Like the American myth on which it is based, Whitehead’s novel “John Henry Days” is a heady mix of fact and fiction. “But as I walked around there, I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to have to make up a lot of stuff.’” That decision actually freed him up, he says. “I wanted it to be perfect,” he says of his March 1998 pilgrimage to Talcott, W.Va.

Big Bend Mountain itself was a dinky disappointment, and Henry’s tunnel was far less impressive than the one carved out by Whitehead’s imagination. After all, he was standing inside the very mountain that, according to Appalachian legend, had been blasted through with the help of John Henry, the fabled “steel-driving man.” The black laborer’s brawny exploits in building the C&O Railroad had inspired a famous folk ballad - as well as the novel Whitehead was struggling to write. “It was really dank and muddy.” As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he tried to block out the graffiti covering the tunnel’s slick walls and summon a sense of grandeur. “Water was dripping everywhere,” he recalls. Colson Whitehead warily approached the cold, abandoned tunnel and ventured inside.

John henry days by colson whitehead