Percival Everett Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

On Monday, the American writer Percival Everett won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel James, his second Pulitzer following his 2021 win for the novel The Trees. A finalist for the Booker Prize, James had already been awarded the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award. A few weeks ago, American Fiction, the film based on Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, also picked up five Oscar nominations, eventually winning Best Adapted Screenplay. James is a re-imagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), regarded as one of the enduring classics of American literature and an essential piece of Americana.

In Twain’s novel, Huck, a 13-14-year-old boy, embarks on a picaresque adventure, meeting colourful characters while sailing down the Mississippi river in antebellum America alongside his friend Jim, an escaped slave. James loosely recreates a similar sequence of adventures, this time from Jim’s point of view. While Twain did humanise Jim to some extent, his portrayal has drawn criticism down the years for racial stereotyping. Twain’s Jim is simple, honest and childlike in many respects, and in the book’s climactic chapters, needs Tom and Huck to “steal” him away from his captors.

Everett’s Jim, on the other hand, is an intellectual who has secretly read dozens of books from Judge Thatcher’s library (Judge Thatcher is a ‘saviour’ character in Twain’s book, protecting Huck from his alcoholic, abusive father Pap). He is an ambitious reader, advanced enough to hold entire inner dialogues with Voltaire and John Locke about the nature of slavery. In a bravura passage where Jim is bitten by a snake and begins to hallucinate, we understand the true extent of both his erudition (his sudden utterance of French words makes Huck concerned about him “sounding funny”) and his loneliness (he has to stay “in character” in front of Huck and other white people).

“I had read them secretly, but this time, in this fever dream, I was able to read without fear of being discovered. I had wondered every time I sneaked in there what white people would do to a slave who had learned how to read. What would they do to a slave who had taught the other slaves to read? What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?”

The cornerstone of Everett’s Jim, then, is performance. For the white men around him, he is performing the role of a Black man, with clumsy grammar, an exaggerated accent and a rudimentary intellect. He’s doing what in the modern era is called ‘code-switching’. Moreover, he is teaching the children of slaves how to code-switch optimally, in the interests of self-preservation (he calls it “situational translation” which has to be one of the phrases of the year).

“Papa, why do we have to learn this?”

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.”

The code-switching passages make for some excellent dark comedy. Everett has described his own writing as “pathologically ironic” in the past and the passages where he renders the “slave talk” (as Huck puts it) are some of the funniest in 21^st century American literature. Everett is a first-rate comedian-of-culture, and one gets the nagging feeling that if he needs to, he can sound like anybody under the sun. His 2001 novel Erasure (and its film adaptation American Fiction) followed an African-American novelist who deliberately writes a cliched, stereotypical novel. It’s a curious kind of literary ventriloquism that lesser writers would not have been able to pull off.

“The children said together, ‘And the better they feel, the safer we are.’

“February, translate that.”

“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

“Nice.”

As the novel slowly diverges from the contours of Twain’s story, the tenor shifts from the comedic-picaresque to a more contemporary, serious-minded tonality. Huck and Jim develop a grudging bond because despite Huck’s whiteness, Jim sees an outsider, an outcaste in him and wants to look out for the boy as best he can. Jim witnesses a white overseer at a plantation raping a slave woman — in an emotionally charged scene Jim strangles this man while confessing that the part he enjoyed the most was “not caring”. In these segments we see Jim channelling some of the righteous vengeance of other prominent antebellum characters in recent times, like the titular emancipated slave-gunslinger in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), played by Jamie Foxx.

Historically speaking, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has drawn more than its fair share of criticism, especially from other writers. Louisa Alcott hated the character of Huck and felt that Twain was corrupting the minds of young readers. Ernest Hemingway, while he liked the book, felt that the last few chapters, involving Huck and Tom ‘rescuing’ Jim, ruined the narrative. Throughout the 2010s, as issues of free speech and censorship started overtaking the American classroom, many politicians have called to ban the novel from public schools, libraries et cetera, citing in particular Twain’s era-appropriate usage of the n-word (the book has over 200 instances of the n-word).

However, the book has also had its famous backers, including the great Ralph Ellison (author of the novel Invisible Man), who wrote an essay on Huckleberry Finn and its criticism in his 1964 essay collection Shadow and Act. According to Ellison, Hemingway had “largely ignored” African-American characters in his own fiction and moreover, had completely misread the last few chapters of Twain’s book. In Ellison’s reading, Huck’s decision to “steal” Jim away from his captors was an act of rebellion wherein he distances himself from his racist white peers.

“And it will be noted that when Huck makes his decision he identifies himself with Jim and accepts the judgment of his superego—that internalised representative of the community—that his action is evil. Like Prometheus, who for mankind stole fire from the gods, he embraces the evil implicit in his act to affirm his belief in humanity. Jim, therefore, is not simply a slave, he is a symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town.”

Despite his “rewriting” of some of Twain’s excesses and minstrel-style comedic scenes, Everett retains a sense of warmth and even readerly gratitude towards both Huck, and Twain’s novel in general. In the introduction to James, Everett credits Twain for his “wisdom and humour” which, he says, enriched his life long before he became a writer himself. In his official Booker interview on the prize’s website, Everett had said (in 2024), “I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”

Two Pulitzers, a Booker nomination and an Oscar in these last five years means that Everett’s work is receiving renewed critical attention across the globe, not just American literary magazines. And rightly so, because as James shows us, this is a master of his craft operating at the peak of his powers.

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