Writing home.

Every writer has a place they call home. For James Baldwin, it was Harlem. For Zora Neale Hurston, it was Eatonville, Florida. Whether consciously or intuitively, that sense of place invariably creeps into an author's writing. Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins' novels are set in Los Angeles--the city where he grew up--replete with familiar landmarks and references that native Angelenos easily recognize. For Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days and his first novel, The Intuitionist, home is New York City.

Born in Manhattan, the 32-year-old Whitehead has lived all over the city. "We were a family of renters," he says of his childhood. "Every three years, depending on fortune and how many kids were in the house, we'd move up and down Manhattan. I was born on 139th [Street] and Riverside, and we lived there until I was in kindergarten," he recalls. "Then we moved a couple of times, until finally in high school, I ended up on 101st and West End Avenue. All of these different neighborhoods--the East Side, the Upper West Side, Harlem--they've left their mark on me."

For the past eight years through, Whitehead has lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that has recently undergone the kind of demographic changes that gentrification engenders. Although the house he lives in with his wife, Natasha, has the hardscrabble look of a clapboard row house in need of a little paint, it possesses the kind of charm that reflects the optimism of the neighborhood, easily fitting in with the trendy restaurants a couple of blocks away and the bodegas around the corner.

"I'm definitely a New Yorker," says Whitehead. "I've tried living other places, but I always end up coming back here. It's always nice to walk around the neighborhood and say, `Oh yeah, that's the cramped apartment where I wrote The Intuitionist. Or that's 757 Fulton where I wrote half of John Henry'," he says. "All of these places have an additional layer of meaning for me, because where I write is so tied to the book--the memory of writing in certain rooms, on certain tables."

In The Intuitionist, a novel about a black elevator inspector Lila Mae Watson, the story takes place amid the kind of urban architecture--skyscrapers and congested spaces--much like Manhattan. "I was broke and living in a really small place," says Whitehead, describing the period when he was writing the novel. "I think that's why Lila Mae Watson, in The Intuitionist, ends up in a series of very tiny rooms," he says.

"I always try and put some Brooklyn names in my book," he adds. "The big elevator inspector, who is a theorist and an Intuitionist, is named Fulton, and that's because I wrote the book on Fulton Street. Every time I'd look out the window, it would enter the book."

In John Henry Days, Whitehead takes the story of the familiar black folk hero John Henry, who prevails in a contest against a steam drill and afterward dies of exhaustion, and turns it into a metaphor about the "Machine Age" versus the "Information Age." In the novel, a young black freelance journalist from New York named J. Sutter heads to West Virginia on a junket to cover a backwater media event called "John Henry Days," a festival celebrating a new postage stamp in honor of the famous steel-driver.

"There's an encounter that J. Sutter has with this crackhead that was drawn from my own experience with a pretty well-known crackhead in the neighborhood," says Whitehead. In real life, he says, the guy was arrested and offered the choice of going to jail or entering rehab. "He entered rehab, and now he has a job reconditioning these brownstones that people are buying. He has his own construction business, owns a house, and has put on, like, 200 pounds. It's somewhat parallel with the ongoing gentrification of the neighborhood," he observes.

"I saw him one day and I didn't recognize him," he says of the real-life former drug abuser. "He came up to me and said, `Hey, I remember you. Remember me?' It was kind of an awkward exchange," says Whitehead. "He said, `I just want to apologize.'"

Right now, Whitehead is working on a book of essays about New York, due out next spring. "I started them when I finished John Henry and I was still in writing mode," he says.

"I just started writing, not knowing what these pieces were about. I did a piece about Central Park, and I did one about the Port Authority," he says. "For research, I walk around and just take notes and try to eavesdrop on the city. So I've been walking around and trying to get a feel for how people experience these New York places like Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge."

As for the allure of his hometown, Whitehead says, "I think I identify myself with the metropolis. But America is bigger than the seven-mile strip of Manhattan. So partially, I'm trying to figure out how I fit into America through these different people."

Colson Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award for 1999 and was a finalist that year for the Ernest Hemingway/ PEN Award for First Fiction. In 2000, he was the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award. And in March of this year, he received the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award for his second novel, John Henry Days.