He and his wife, journalist Natasha Stovall, recently bought a house in Brooklyn. Whitehead finds this somewhat ironic because he said he was a self-proclaimed "Manhattan Snob" growing up and had only been in Brooklyn twice before moving to Brooklyn's Fort Greene section after graduating from college. Back then, he wrote a television column for The Village Voice, and Fort Greene was the hip, bohemian neighborhood of the day.

"The Colossus of New York" came to fruition shortly after Whitehead finished writing his second novel about two years ago called, "John Henry Days," the story of a journalist named J. Sutter who makes his way through life by freeloading off of media junkets. He was still "on" creatively and was looking for an outlet for some of his energy. He had always been a roamer, and he started putting together essays about different areas that appealed to him.

In the chapter about the subway, he writes, "Straphanging is actually an antiquated term. It's all metal now, swiveling commas, poles in perpendicular arrangements. But they still hang, still droop, dangle on curled fingers. Feet next to feet. The pole is sickeningly warm — God forbid, moist — from previous fingers."

He emphasized that even though he addresses some things that are uniquely New York, such as walking through Times Square, he hopes that the book translates easily to other cities.

"I use New York to talk about home," he says. "But the ideas in 'Colossus' could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves."

The project was also a welcome break from the long-term process of his novels. In 1999, Whitehead published "The Intuitionist," the story of Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector who gets mixed up in scandal when an elevator goes into free fall and it is blamed on her.

The book earned him a Whiting Award for young writers with exceptional promise. Three years later came "John Henry Days" which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly after, Whitehead won a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a "genius grant."

Whitehead now writes at home and occasionally teaches at Columbia University and the University of Houston. Walking is the only exercise he gets, and like so many New Yorkers, he doesn't drive.

He has a third novel slated to come out in the spring. After that, he's not sure what's in store for him.

He still takes long walks over the Brooklyn Bridge, one of his favorite pastimes, and traipses around his favorite neighborhoods, sometimes for hours. Right now his areas of interest are the blocks between Union Square and Canal Street, which are lined with shops, restaurants and New York University buildings.

"I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square," Whitehead says. "It's such a mix of people, like a party. There's always an errand you can do along there, whether it's picking up contacts or buying poker chips."