A year ago, Percival Everett published his twenty-fourth novel, “James,” and it became a literary phenomenon. It won the National Book Award, and, just this week, was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “James” offers a radically different perspective on the classic Mark Twain novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: Everett centers his story on the character of Jim, who is escaping slavery. The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas is a longtime Everett fan, and talked with the novelist just after “James” was released. “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in ‘Huck Finn’ is simple.” This segment originally aired on March 22, 2024.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Percival Everett used to be a writer deeply admired by critics, but a relatively small number of serious readers. I put it in the past tense, Everett is very much alive, because a year ago he published his 24th novel, a book called James, and James just blew up.
It won the National Book Award, and last week it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Staff writer Julian Lucas is a very close reader of Percival Everett's novels.
Whether it's his novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, about a character who ends up stuck in the plot of basically every Sidney Poitier movie, or Erasure, about a black novelist so frustrated by the pigeonholing in the publishing industry that he writes an elaborate literary prank under a pseudonym.
To read Percival Everett is always to grapple with the prejudices and the assumptions and the acts of imagination that we have to make in communicating with one another through fiction and through art. And so when I saw that he was rewriting Huckleberry Finn...
I knew that it would be an opportunity not just to read a great narrative, but also to read along with him one of the foundational stories in the American narrative.
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