How a Literary Darling Finally Broke Through to the Mainstream
Percival Everett is poised for a big year. James, his twist on Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" told from the perspective of the runaway slave Jim, is racking up rave reviews and already making best-of 2024 lists. Publishing executives expect the book’s arrival on Tuesday to mark the veteran author’s long-awaited leap from literary cult favorite to commercial brand name.
The novel comes on the heels of “American Fiction," which just won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Written by Cord Jefferson, the film is based on Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, a satire about racial hypocrisy in publishing. The comedy drama stars Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated novelist who toys with the industry’s prejudices imposed on the books Black authors write.
When he initially came up with James, Everett was shocked not to find more alternative versions of Jim in contemporary literature. In Everett’s telling, Jim, who actually goes by James, is a writer and hardcore book lover who puts on an illiterate persona to protect himself from the wrath of insecure whites. Some of the book’s funniest moments occur when he and the other enslaved forget to dumb themselves down in mixed company.
Elements of Twain’s 1884 novel remain—there’s still a raft trip down the Mississippi River with Huck and run-ins with some of the same unsavory characters–but that’s just a jumping off point. Everett, 67, who writes longhand in pencil from various rooms of his house in South Pasadena, Calif., has roamed everywhere from ranch life to antiquity in his work. His books explore layered themes with humor and, at times, existential cheekiness, as in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, a novel about a person named Not Sidney Poitier who looks just like the actor
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