The Intuitionist is a 1998 novel by Colson Whitehead. It falls broadly into speculative fiction.

A paperback edition was issued in Garden City, N.Y. by Anchor Books in 1999 with ISBN 0385493002, ISBN 0385492995 .

The Intuitionist takes place in a modern city (implicitly, New York, New York) full of skyscrapers and other buildings requiring vertical transportation in the form of elevators. The protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector of the "intuitionist" school (which should not be confused with Intuitionism). The Intuitionists practice an inspecting method by which they stand in an elevator and simply feel or intuit whether it's in jeopardy of falling. The competing school, the "empiricists" (again, not to be confused with Empiricism), insist upon traditional instrument-based verification of the condition of the elevator. Watson is the second black inspector and the first black female inspector in the city.

The book is a race allegory of sorts, in which the concept of the elevator, of "uplift" is perhaps a metaphor for racial progress.

Plot summary

The story begins with the catastrophic failure of an elevator which Watson had inspected just days before, leading to suspicion cast upon both herself and the intuitionist school as a whole. To cope with the inspectorate, the corporate elevator establishment, and other looming elements, she must return to her intellectual roots, the texts (both known and lost) of the founder of the school, to try to reconstruct what is happening around her.