The Nickel Boys (2019) won Colson Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making him one of just four writers to win it twice. The novel’s main setting is the Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school in mid-1960s Florida, based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys.
Like its historical counterpart, Nickel operates as a front for the coercion of unpaid labour from the boys detained there, who are subject to beatings, rapes and psychological torture, and whose efforts to run away or resist often prove fatal.
