Percival Everett: A Biography of Literary Innovation and Diverse Pursuits
Percival Everett is not exactly a cult taste, but for a man who’s published more than thirty books, including twenty-three novels, four short-story collections, six books of poetry, and a title for children, he’s not that widely known. Percival Leonard Everett II (born December 22, 1956) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Partly that’s because he’s a master of so many different genres, from crime novels to retellings of Greek myth, from revisionist westerns to absurdist capers, from thriller to farce, and with each one, he breaks with convention: he’ll slip a spoof of post-structuralist theory alongside a chilling depiction of an attack on an abortion clinic, or he’ll unleash a satire of so-called ghetto fiction. Until the release of James and the film adaption of Erasure, both of which garnered him mainstream fame, he was regarded as a cult writer in the United States.
Everett is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. His satiric novel Erasure (2001) was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film American Fiction (2023). Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K.
Early Life and Education
Percival Everett was born in Georgia in 1956 and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. Percival Everett was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1956 and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. Army sergeant, Everett was born at a military post in Georgia. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where his family moved not long after he was born and where his father opened a dentistry practice. He comes from a family of doctors. His father was a dentist. His father became a dentist and his parents continued to live in South Carolina. His mother was Dorothy (née Stinson) Everett. He has a sister, Denise Everett, a physician in Raleigh, NC. As a child, Everett developed a love of reading. He graduated from high school at age 16, after which he attended the University of Miami in Florida and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy with a minor in biochemistry in 1977. In college he played jazz and blues guitar in clubs to help pay his tuition, and he also taught high-school math.
After graduating from the University of Miami, Everett studied the philosophy of language at the University of Oregon before switching to a master’s program in fiction at Brown, where he wrote his first comic novel. As a philosophy student, Everett was especially interested in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and in philosophy of language, which spurred him to start writing dialogue as part of his studies. In 1978 he began a doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Oregon in Eugene. While living in Oregon he worked as a ranch hand on sheep and cattle ranches. Over time he became disenchanted with philosophy and turned to writing fiction. He left the program in Eugene after two years and enrolled in a master’s program in creative writing at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. There he wrote Suder (1983), a novel about a baseball player for the Seattle Mariners whose career is in decline, sending the protagonist on a quest across the Pacific Northwest. The American West would become a recurring backdrop in Everett’s fiction. It was here that he came under the influence of Robert Coover, a writer known for fabulation and metafiction.
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Early Career and Teaching
While completing his M.A. degree, Everett wrote his first novel, Suder (1983). Everett's second novel, Walk Me to the Distance (1985), features veteran David Larson after his return from Vietnam. Larson becomes involved in a search for the developmentally disabled son of a sheep rancher in Slut's Whole, Wyoming. The novel was later adapted, with an altered plot, as an ABC-TV movie titled Follow Your Heart. Everett disowned this adaptation, stating: "I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn't like it. Cutting Lisa, Everett's third novel (1986; reissued 2000), begins with John Livesey meeting a man who has performed a Caesarean section. Switching genres, Everett next wrote a children's book, The One That Got Away (1992).
In the mid-1980s through the ’90s Everett taught at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana (where he met the woman who became his second wife, Francesca Rochberg, a scholar of Assyrian history and astronomy), and the University of California at Riverside. In California Everett and Rochberg bought a 14-acre (5.7-hectare) ranch in Moreno Valley, about 65 miles (105 km) east of Los Angeles. There he tended to their herd of mules, horses, and donkeys and spent much of his time doing farmwork. In interviews, Everett has said that animals have taught him patience and that farmwork helps him put things in perspective.
Prolific Writing Career
Returning to novels, Everett published his first book-length western, God's Country, in 1994. In this novel, Curt Marder and his black tracker Bubba search "God's country" for Marder's wife, who has been kidnapped by bandits. Marder is not sure whether he wants to find her. The book is a parody of westerns and the politics of race and gender. In 1996, Everett published two books: Watershed has a contemporary western setting, in which the loner hydrologist Robert Hawkes meets a Native American "small person", who helps him come to terms with the interrelation of people. In Frenzy (1997), Everett returned to Greek mythology. Vlepo, Dionysos's assistant, is forced to undergo a "frenzy" of odd activities, including becoming lice and bedroom curtains at different times during the story, which he narrates. Glyph (1999) is the story within a story of Ralph, a baby who chooses not to speak but has extraordinary muscle control and an IQ nearing 500. He writes notes to his mother on a variety of literary topics based on books she supplies. Ralph is kidnapped several times by parties trying to exploit his special skills. (2001) is Everett's first novella.
In 1998 Everett began working as a professor of English at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, where he remains on the faculty and has served as chair of the English department and director of the doctoral program in literature and creative writing. By 1999 he had published more than a dozen books and had started a partnership with Graywolf Press, an independent publisher based in Minnesota that has issued the majority of his books.
Erasure (2001) is a satirical novel that portrays how the publishing industry pigeonholes African-American writers. The novel, a metafictional piece, revolves around the main character's decision to write an outrageous novella, based among the black urban poor and dissolute, titled My Pafology. In 2001 Everett published Erasure, a novel about a writer of esoteric fiction who is frustrated with the way African American authors like himself are pigeonholed by the publishing industry. The protagonist, Thelonious (“Monk”) Ellison, adopts the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh and writes a satiric exploitative novel called My Pafology, intending to have his agent send it to publishers as a kind of rebuke of the industry. To Monk’s surprise, and horror, it becomes a massive commercial and literary success.
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A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004), is an epistolary novel that chronicles the characters Percival Everett and James Kincaid as they work with US Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) (occasionally) and his aide's crazy assistant, Barton Wilkes. Also in 2004, Everett released a third collection of short stories, Damned If I Do: Stories, as well as the novel American Desert. In American Desert, Ted Street plans to drown himself in the ocean but is killed in a traffic accident on the way there. Three days later, Street suddenly sits up in his casket at the funeral, although his head is severed and he lacks a beating heart.
Wounded: A Novel (2005) tells the story of John Hunt, a horse trainer confronted with hate crimes against a homosexual and a Native American. Everett's 2006 collection of poetry, re:f (gesture), features one of his paintings on the front cover. The Water Cure (2007) is a novel about Ishmael Kidder, who has had a successful career as a romance novelist until the death of his daughter, when his life takes a dark turn. In a remote cabin in New Mexico, Kidder has imprisoned a man he believes to be his daughter's killer. In 2009, Graywolf Press released I Am Not Sidney Poitier. The protagonist, named Not Sidney Poitier, meets challenges relating to identity and racial segregation across North America.
Assumption: A Novel (2011) is a triptych of stories with some characters who have been in earlier Everett stories. The story "Big" returns to the character of Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town. He is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. In 2013, Graywolf Press published Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel, a novel in which a man visits his father in a nursing home, where his father appears to be writing a novel from the point of view of his son.
Eight years later, the same press published The Trees, a satirical novel about historic and contemporary lynchings in Mississippi, the South and across the US. (It was published in the UK by Influx Press). Following Telephone, his mystery thriller The Trees (2021) was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
In 2024 Everett published James, a reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) that places Jim, Huck’s enslaved friend, at the center of the story. Critics heralded James for its compassionate and complex portrayal of a character that some Twain scholars have deemed a racist, two-dimensional caricature. Everett’s novel was a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the National Book Award for fiction. In 2025 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 2023, the film American Fiction was released, with a screenplay adapted by its director Cord Jefferson from Everett's 2001 novel Erasure. James, published by Doubleday in 2024, is a re-imagining of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave character Jim. Everett humanizes the character, who goes by James, reinventing him as a wise and literate man, who has conversations with enlightenment philosophers in his dreams and teaches other enslaved people to read. James and the other black characters in the book hide their literacy and wisdom from the white characters, who would feel threatened by educated blacks and further punish them. Other works include The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843: Annotated From the Library of John C. Ploughshares, Fall 2014 (vol.
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Recognition and Awards
In 2002 Erasure won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. The book found a new audience in 2023 after the release of an acclaimed film adaptation, American Fiction, which was directed and written by Cord Jefferson and starred Jeffrey Wright as Monk. The New York Times included the novel on its list of 100 best books of the 21st century. His novel Dr. No (2022), about a math professor whose alter ego is an expert on nothing, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Everett received an honorary doctorate from the College of Santa Fe in 2008. Everett has served as fiction editor for Callaloo, a prominent arts and culture journal of the African diaspora. His short-story collections include Big Picture (1996) and Half an Inch of Water (2015). Among his other honors are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2014 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 2015. In 2021 he also received the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.
Everett's Perspective on Identity and Art
Monk’s complaints in Erasure echo those made by Everett three years later upon the publication of his novels American Desert and A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond (the latter written with James Kincaid). Everett has also resisted labels about “the Black experience.” In an interview with writer Rone Shavers published in BOMB magazine in 2004, Everett noted his family lineage of doctors and his friendships with ranchers, veterinarians, and hydrologists and said, Occasionally someone will say, “That’s not the Black experience.” And I laugh and say, “I’m Black, and that’s my experience.” I know a lot of Black people whose experience is that, but it’s not what people want to think is the Black experience-they want their Black experience to be inner city and rural South.
Everett has often been described as an “underappreciated” talent and a “writer’s writer.” His longtime editor and publisher, Fiona McCrae, has suggested that the variety of his work, which is difficult to define, might account for why he has been slow to receive widespread recognition. But in the 21st century Everett began to receive significant recognition for his work, starting with his novel Telephone (2020), which was released in three separate editions featuring different endings and was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Upon the novel’s publication McCrae told The New York Times that a larger audience had learned to appreciate Everett for exactly the quality that had at first caused him to be overlooked. His work’s inability to be easily defined had become “the very thing that people marvel at.”
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