Percival Everett

Percival Leonard Everett II was born on December 22, 1956, at Fort Gordon, an Army post in Georgia. His father, who had the same name, was a sergeant who later became a dentist. The family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, when he was a baby, and that is where he grew up. He studied philosophy at the University of Miami, dabbled in biochemistry and mathematical logic, and in 1982 finished a master's in fiction at Brown University.

His debut came fast, in 1983, with Suder, about a baseball player in a deep slump. From then on Everett never stopped and never repeated himself. He has written westerns, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical novels, sometimes all inside one book. He also became a teacher and is now a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

The book that drew the most attention early on was Erasure, in 2001. Its hero is a Black, highly literary novelist who keeps hearing that his books are not Black enough. Fed up, he makes up a pen name and writes a cliché-stuffed parody that becomes a hit. The publishing satire won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and, more than twenty years later, became Cord Jefferson's film American Fiction, which won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2024.

From 2020 on, his career shifted into another gear. Telephone was a Pulitzer finalist. The Trees, from 2021, follows two detectives looking into strange deaths in Money, Mississippi, the town where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. It made the Booker shortlist and won the Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. Dr. No, from 2022, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

Then came James, in 2024. Everett takes Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and tells the trip down the river from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man traveling with the boy. It won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, made the Booker shortlist and, in 2025, took the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Dry humor, a taste for the absurd and an obsession with language run through everything he writes, along with the question of what it means to be Black in America. Everett lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, and their two children. In 2025 he made TIME's list of the 100 most influential people.