Set against the unusual backdrop of an investigation into elevator operations, The Intuitionist is an allegorical tale of blacks' struggle for upward mobility.

This witty, linguistic powerhouse, who brought the world The Intuitionist (1998), John Henry Days (2001) and The Colossus of New York (2003), tops the list as one of the most humorous and dangerously unpredictable writers of our time.

Reading Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999) in an African American literature course alongside, say, Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000)--like reading Bellow's Herzog in a Jewish American literature course alongside Smith's The Autograph Man--just might encourage students to begin their own interrogation of and negotiations with the complex multicultural world to which they belong.