South Pasadena’s Percival Everett, a USC professor, wins Pulitzer for ‘James’
South Pasadena’s Percival Everett, a USC professor, wins Pulitzer for ‘James’
South Pasadena novelist and USC professor Percival Everett won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Monday for his 24th novel, “James.”
Published in March 2024 to widespread critical acclaim, “James” was named a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize and the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and went on to win the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.
“James” is a retelling of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told from the perspective of Jim, an enslaved man determined to reunite with his family.
The Pulitzer committee praised the book as an accomplished reconsideration that “illustrates the absurdity of racial supremacy and provides a new take on the search for family and freedom.”
Everett’s decades-long literary career has seen a major resurgence in recent years.
In 2021, he won the PEN/Jean Stein Award for his novel “Dr. No,” was a Pulitzer finalist for “Telephone” and landed on the Booker shortlist for “The Trees.”
His 2001 satire “Erasure,” a critique of racial stereotypes in publishing, was adapted into the 2023 film “American Fiction,” which earned multiple Oscar nominations and brought his work to a much broader audience.
The Washington Post has called Everett, 68, “one of the most adventurously experimental of modern American novelists.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass hailed Everett’s Pulitzer win, writing on X, “LA’s very own Percival Everett just won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his latest novel, ‘James,’ a re-imagining of ‘The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.’ A distinguished professor of English at USC & a prolific writer, Percival Everett inspires us through his words. Congratulations on this extraordinary achievement!”
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