Percival Everett

Percival Everett is one of the most consistently inventive and intellectually adventurous novelists working in American fiction today. Born in 1956 in Fort Gordon, Georgia, he has published more than thirty books across an extraordinary range of genres and registers — satire, Western, experimental fiction, children’s books, and literary fiction that defies easy categorization. He has taught at the University of Southern California for many years and is a professor in the English department there. His work is characterized by philosophical depth, formal daring, and a refusal to settle for the expected. He received widespread recognition with The Trees (2021), a savage satirical novel about racial violence in America that was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and reached an even larger audience with James (2024), a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. James won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the Kirkus Prize, establishing Everett as one of the defining literary voices of his generation.