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A Dead White by Wendy S. Walters

from $11.99
Hardcover:

A National Book Award longlist selection for Nonfiction, from cultural critic Wendy S. Walters.

It’s hard to name a material that takes up more visual space, and gets less critical attention, than white paint. We’re taught to see it as neutral — a blank slate that signifies nothing at all.

Wendy S. Walters isn’t so sure. Starting from her own unsettled reaction to the gleaming white walls of her son’s newly renovated school, she traces white paint’s outsized role in art, architecture, and the rooms we live in every day.

From Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim to the White House’s own whitewashed history, Walters shows how a color we treat as an absence of choice is, in fact, a series of very deliberate ones.

A Dead White is part cultural criticism, part personal essay — a book that will change how you see the walls around you.

A National Book Award longlist selection for Nonfiction, from cultural critic Wendy S. Walters.

It’s hard to name a material that takes up more visual space, and gets less critical attention, than white paint. We’re taught to see it as neutral — a blank slate that signifies nothing at all.

Wendy S. Walters isn’t so sure. Starting from her own unsettled reaction to the gleaming white walls of her son’s newly renovated school, she traces white paint’s outsized role in art, architecture, and the rooms we live in every day.

From Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim to the White House’s own whitewashed history, Walters shows how a color we treat as an absence of choice is, in fact, a series of very deliberate ones.

A Dead White is part cultural criticism, part personal essay — a book that will change how you see the walls around you.

  • Publisher: Scribner (Simon & Schuster)

    Title: A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint

    Author: Wendy S. Walters

    On Sale Date: October 13, 2026

    ISBN 13: 9781982178574

    Format: Hardcover

    Retail Price: $29.99

    Page Count: 352

  • Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal and Troy, Michigan. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Yale Review, and she is an associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

  • Pre-release readers are calling it recursive, resounding, erudite:

    • “Recursive yet resounding, a carefully curated aesthetic journey.” —Kirkus Reviews

    • “The rare work of criticism that will change how you see the world around you.” —Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

    • Traces white paint’s influence from fine art and architecture into the home and consumer culture.

    • From an essayist and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Yale Review.

This book is for you if

  • You want cultural criticism that takes something totally ordinary and makes it strange again.

  • You’re interested in the hidden politics of art, architecture, and design choices.

  • You appreciate essayists who blend personal experience with intellectual argument.

  • You want a short, dense book you can read in a weekend and think about for months.

  • You’re drawn to writers who’ve written for The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Yale Review.

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