Percival Everett

Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956, Fort Gordon (now Fort Eisenhower), Georgia, U.S.) is an American writer whose works reflect a wide range of subjects and styles and often deal head-on with philosophy and preconceptions concerning race. He has authored more than 30 books of fiction and poetry, including the novels I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and Telephone (2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His satiric novel Erasure (2001) was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film American Fiction (2023). In 2024 his novel James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), won the National Book Award for fiction. Regarded as a cult writer in the United States, Everett has been described by The Washington Post as among “the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.”

Early life

The son of a U.S. Army sergeant, Everett was born at a military post in Georgia. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where his family moved not long after he was born and where his father opened a dentistry practice. (Coming from a long line of medical practitioners, Everett has quipped that he “had to break the chain” in his decision to become a writer.) As a child, Everett developed a love of reading. He graduated from high school at age 16, after which he attended the University of Miami in Florida and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy with a minor in biochemistry in 1977. In college he played jazz and blues guitar in clubs to help pay his tuition, and he also taught high-school math.

First publications and teaching career

As a philosophy student, Everett was especially interested in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and in philosophy of language, which spurred him to start writing dialogue as part of his studies. In 1978 he began a doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Oregon in Eugene. While living in Oregon he worked as a ranch hand on sheep and cattle ranches. Over time he became disenchanted with philosophy and turned to writing fiction. He left the program in Eugene after two years and enrolled in a master’s program in creative writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. There he wrote Suder (1983), a novel about a baseball player for the Seattle Mariners whose career is in decline, sending the protagonist on a quest across the Pacific Northwest. The American West would become a recurring backdrop in Everett’s fiction.

In the mid-1980s through the ’90s Everett taught at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana (where he met the woman who became his second wife, Francesca Rochberg, a scholar of Assyrian history and astronomy), and the University of California at Riverside. In California Everett and Rochberg bought a 14-acre (5.7-hectare) ranch in Moreno Valley, about 65 miles (105 km) east of Los Angeles. There he tended to their herd of mules, horses, and donkeys and spent much of his time doing farmwork. In interviews, Everett has said that animals have taught him patience and that farmwork helps him put things in perspective.

In 1998 Everett began working as a professor of English at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where he remains on the faculty and has served as chair of the English department and director of the doctoral program in literature and creative writing. By 1999 he had published more than a dozen books and had started a partnership with Graywolf Press, an independent publisher based in Minnesota that has issued the majority of his books.

Erasure

In 2001 Everett published Erasure, a novel about a writer of esoteric fiction who is frustrated with the way African American authors like himself are pigeonholed by the publishing industry. The protagonist, Thelonious (“Monk”) Ellison, adopts the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh and writes a satiric exploitative novel called My Pafology, intending to have his agent send it to publishers as a kind of rebuke of the industry. To Monk’s surprise, and horror, it becomes a massive commercial and literary success. In 2002 Erasure won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. The book found a new audience in 2023 after the release of an acclaimed film adaptation, American Fiction, which was directed and written by Cord Jefferson and starred Jeffrey Wright as Monk. The New York Times included the novel on its list of 100 best books of the 21st century.

Monk’s complaints in Erasure echo those made by Everett three years later upon the publication of his novels American Desert and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (the latter written with James Kincaid). After the author Sven Birkerts published a review in The New York Times Book Review that identified Everett as African American in the second sentence, Everett responded in a letter to the Times:

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I feel confident in stating that the color of my skin has little to do with [American Desert]. I also feel confident in stating that I am sure that Birkerts in previous reviews has not found it necessary to identify other authors as European-American or white.

Everett also decried the “insidious racism” in American culture that has had an impact on people’s response to art, whereby publishers and readers of fiction tend to assume a character is white unless the narration suggests otherwise. Everett has also resisted labels about “the Black experience.” In an interview with writer Rone Shavers published in BOMB magazine in 2004, Everett noted his family lineage of doctors and his friendships with ranchers, veterinarians, and hydrologists and said,

Occasionally someone will say, “That’s not the Black experience.” And I laugh and say, “I’m Black, and that’s my experience.” I know a lot of Black people whose experience is that, but it’s not what people want to think is the Black experience—they want their Black experience to be inner city and rural South.

Telephone

Everett has often been described as an “underappreciated” talent and a “writer’s writer.” His longtime editor and publisher, Fiona McCrae, has suggested that the variety of his work, which is difficult to define, might account for why he has been slow to receive widespread recognition. But in the 21st century Everett began to receive significant recognition for his work, starting with his novel Telephone (2020), which was released in three separate editions featuring different endings and was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Upon the novel’s publication McCrae told The New York Times that a larger audience had learned to appreciate Everett for exactly the quality that had at first caused him to be overlooked. His work’s inability to be easily defined had become “the very thing that people marvel at.”

The Trees, Dr. No, and James

Following Telephone, his mystery thriller The Trees (2021) was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His novel Dr. No (2022), about a math professor whose alter ego is an expert on nothing, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

In 2024 Everett published James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that places Jim, Huck’s enslaved friend, at the center of the story. Critics heralded James for its compassionate and complex portrayal of a character that some Twain scholars have deemed a racist, two-dimensional caricature. Everett’s novel was a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the National Book Award for fiction.

Other works and honors

Everett has served as fiction editor for Callaloo, a prominent arts and culture journal of the African diaspora. His short-story collections include Big Picture (1996) and Half an Inch of Water (2015). In 2006 he published the poetry collection re: f (gesture), followed by Swimming Swimmers Swimming (2011) and Trout’s Lie (2015).

Among his other honors are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2014 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2015. In 2021 he also received the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.