https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/22691
Prize Winners
The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction
For distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
Prize Winners
The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction
For distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
James
by Percival Everett
Doubleday, 2025
An accomplished reconsideration of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.
by Percival Everett
Doubleday, 2025
An accomplished reconsideration of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.
Winning Work:
James
by Percival Everett
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS
In development as a feature film to be produced by Steven Spielberg • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more.
“Genius”—The Atlantic • “A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own.”—Chicago Tribune • “A provocative, enlightening literary work of art.”—The Boston Globe • “Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”—The New York Times
When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
Biography
Photo: Michael Avedon
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/percival-everett-wins-2025-pulitzer-prize-for-james/
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Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at USC Dornsife. (Composite: Letty Avila. Photo: Ileana Garcia Photography.)
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USC Dornsife’s Percival Everett Wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
The English professor’s novel James offers a searing retelling of a Mark Twain classic — and has now earned fiction’s highest honor.
by Jim Key
May 5, 2025
University of Southern California (USC)
Percival Everett, Distinguished Professor of English at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel James — a bold and poignant reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved character.
Published in March 2024 by Doubleday, James has received a wave of national and international recognition, winning the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
The English professor’s novel James offers a searing retelling of a Mark Twain classic — and has now earned fiction’s highest honor.
by Jim Key
May 5, 2025
University of Southern California (USC)
Percival Everett, Distinguished Professor of English at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel James — a bold and poignant reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved character.
Published in March 2024 by Doubleday, James has received a wave of national and international recognition, winning the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
In a statement through his publisher, Everett said, “I am shocked and pleased, but mostly shocked. This is a wonderful honor. I am especially flattered to have been considered along with the other finalists.”
In its review, The New York Times praised the book as “Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being.”
The Pulitzer Prize Board described James as “an accomplished reconsideration of Huckleberry Finn that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.” Everett was previously a Pulitzer finalist in 2022 for his novel The Trees.
“It’s Percival’s masterful storytelling, wit, and humanity that have earned him this prestigious prize,” said Moh El-Naggar, interim dean of USC Dornsife. “By giving a voice to Jim, Percival shows the power of retelling and challenging even the most classic of tales. USC Dornsife is proud to be home to one of the literary giants of our time.”
Everett is widely regarded as one of the most original and prolific voices in American literature. His genre-defying body of work spans satire, Westerns and experimental prose. His 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 film American Fiction.
“Having some of the most accomplished authors of the century on our faculty is a testament to the caliber of our department and the exceptional talent within it,” said Dana Johnson, chair of USC Dornsife’s English department and Florence R. Scott Professor of English. “I couldn’t be more proud of Percival and the fact that our students learn from some of the nation’s greatest thinkers and writers.”
The popular professor has taught creative writing at USC Dornsife since 1998 and credits his students for their impact on his life. “They keep me from getting old too fast,” he told USC Dornsife News in an earlier interview. “I love their energy. I love their openness to ideas. And that’s something that we can all stand to be reminded of.”
https://time.com/7210599/percival-everett-james-literary-canon/
“Canon formation is necessarily skewed. It’s necessarily racist and sexist. As soon as you’re saying there are these texts that must be read, someone has to choose. Who chooses? Whoever controls language, controls everything. If someone has no voice, they cannot get what they want or what they need. Any work of art that comes out of this American culture is about race. If there is no race in it, that is a statement about race…"
–Percival Everett
Percival Everett Is Challenging the American Literary Canon
by Eliana Dockterman
February 6, 2025
TIME
Percival Everett claims he is not as brilliant as his fans know him to be. He deeply researches the worlds in which his novels are set, yet swears that everything he learns falls out of his head as soon as each book is published. “So I’m no smarter at the end than I was at the beginning,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. Years ago, sick of his writing students asking him if they were good enough to be published, he took a class to a bookstore in Middlebury, Vt., to prove he was not unique. “Look around,” he told them. “Anyone can be published. ‘Are you good enough to make a difference?’ is the question.”
With his latest, James, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim—who drops his nickname for the more noble-sounding James—Everett has jump-started a conversation about the great American novel, how issues of race interplay with the so-called American canon, and how we talk to our children about America’s past. But just a few hours before he wins the National Book Award for fiction, he demurs when pressed on the book’s impact. “If a reader is coming to me for any kind of message or answer about anything in the world,” he says, “they’re already in deep trouble.”
For many, however, James has become an important companion piece to Mark Twain’s work, the book “all American literature comes from,” to quote Ernest Hemingway. “I’ve been getting lots of mail from former and current English teachers thanking me that they can now teach Huck Finn again because they can do it alongside James,” he admits, “which is great news for me and certainly flattering, but doesn’t come as a great surprise. It’s a problematic text.”
Everett, 68, would do away with the canon altogether if he could. But at the very least he hopes that writers, readers, and educators can acknowledge the inherent issues with putting certain books on a pedestal. “My joke is, ‘The canon is loaded,’” says Everett. “Canon formation is necessarily skewed. It’s necessarily racist and sexist. As soon as you’re saying there are these texts that must be read, someone has to choose. Who chooses?”
While Jim is little more than a sidekick on Huck’s journey down the Mississippi in the original, in Everett’s version he is at the center of the story. James and other Black characters code switch when white characters are present; on his own, James interrogates philosophers like Voltaire for his repugnant views on slavery. “Enslaved people, it had occurred to me, are always depicted as simple-minded and superstitious, and of course, they weren’t,” Everett says. “So I embarked on this.”
Everett gives James the gift of language, and James writes his account of his travels with a stolen pencil stub—one which comes at great human cost. “Whoever controls language, controls everything. If someone has no voice, they cannot get what they want or what they need,” says Everett.
Everett, who has published two dozen novels, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Telephone, has historically bristled at being categorized in the genre of African American fiction, especially considering he has written everything from propulsive westerns to a novella styled like a Lifetime movie. “Any work of art that comes out of this American culture is about race. If there is no race in it, that is a statement about race,” he says.
This frustration is at the heart of Erasure, one of Everett’s early and best-known novels, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning 2023 film American Fiction. The story centers on Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, the author of experimental novels that don’t sell particularly well. Monk becomes so exasperated with the publishing industry bolstering Black fiction that depicts only stereotypes that he pens a novel as an illiterate thug to prove a point. The book is a hit, much to the author’s chagrin. James, too, will get the Hollywood treatment, with Steven Spielberg producing and Taika Waititi in talks to direct, though Everett insists this attention is “fleeting.” “I'll write some experimental novel next that no one will understand,” he says. “You would have to be crazy to get into literary fiction to get famous or to get rich.”
How Percival Everett's James Almost Didn't Win (A Rant and a Pulitzer Prize Deep Dive)
Supposedly Fun
May 9, 2025
#BookTube #Books #PulitzerPrize
There was something odd about the announcement that Percival Everett had won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel James. Here's how he nearly lost.
VIDEO:
Expand for more information:
👇 Links 💻 My Post About This (Including Links to Sources): https://supposedlyfun.com/2025/05/09/...
Time Stamps ⏰
What's the Fuss About the Finalists?
03:17 How James Almost Didn't Win the Pulitzer:
Time Stamps ⏰
What's the Fuss About the Finalists?
03:17 How James Almost Didn't Win the Pulitzer:
04:31 Why Am I Annoyed by This?
10:33 Here Comes the Rant:
14:28 What Is James About?
26:53 Why Did This Win a Pulitzer Prize?
30:48 Is This Novel Any Good?
33:13 Who Is Percival Everett?
37:58 What Was James' Competition for the Pulitzer? 39:20 Should James Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
41:57 Further Viewing 🎥
My Reaction to the 2025 Announcement:
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2025 Reaction
10:33 Here Comes the Rant:
14:28 What Is James About?
26:53 Why Did This Win a Pulitzer Prize?
30:48 Is This Novel Any Good?
33:13 Who Is Percival Everett?
37:58 What Was James' Competition for the Pulitzer? 39:20 Should James Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
41:57 Further Viewing 🎥
My Reaction to the 2025 Announcement:
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2025 Reaction
