Percival Everett

Percival Everett

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and one of American literature's most adventurously experimental voices. A 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner and prolific author of more than 30 books spanning every conceivable genre—from westerns to mysteries, satire to philosophical fiction—Everett has built a career on defying categorization while fearlessly exploring race, identity, and the absurdities of American life.

Born December 22, 1956, at Fort Gordon, Georgia, Everett earned his A.B. in philosophy from the University of Miami and an MFA from Brown University. After teaching at universities including Kentucky, Notre Dame, and UC Riverside, he joined USC in 1998, where he has mentored countless writers while continuing to produce groundbreaking work at an astonishing pace. Known for his self-described "pathological irony," Everett refuses to be pigeonholed, creating what The Washington Post calls "one of the most adventurously experimental" bodies of work in modern American literature.

Everett's masterpiece James (2024), a radical reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, swept the literary world's highest honors—winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and the Kirkus Prize, while being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel transforms Twain's Jim into James, a secretly literate philosopher who code-switches between dialects as a survival strategy, offering what the Pulitzer Board called "an accomplished reconsideration" that "illustrate[s] the absurdity of racial supremacy."

His 2001 novel Erasure, a biting satire of the publishing industry's racial expectations, was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film American Fiction (2023) and named one of the best books of the 21st century by The New York Times. Other acclaimed works include The Trees (2021), a Booker Prize finalist confronting America's history of lynching; Telephone (2020), released in three different versions; and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), showcasing his trademark blend of humor and social commentary.

Among his numerous honors are the Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and multiple Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. Despite this recognition, Everett maintained a cult following for decades before achieving mainstream success, preferring to challenge readers rather than cater to market expectations.

Living in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Danzy Senna, and their children, Everett continues to write prolifically while teaching at USC. His work stands as a testament to literature's power to confront uncomfortable truths, challenge conventional narratives, and reimagine the stories we tell about America. As he once said about reading: "No one can take that away from you"—a philosophy that permeates his transformative body of work.