Percival Everett wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Mark Twain-inspired novel James
Everett's Pulitzer confirmed the million-selling James as the most celebrated and popular U.S. literary novel of 2024, and accelerated the 68-year-old author's remarkable rise after decades of being little known to the general public.
Since 2021, he has won the PEN/Jean Stein Award for Dr. No, was a Pulitzer finalist for Telephone and on the Booker shortlist for The Trees.
Everett's novel, a dramatic reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, already has won the National Book Award. It was also a Booker finalist and won the Kirkus Prize for fiction.
The Pulitzer citation called James an "accomplished reconsideration" that illustrates "the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom."
Everett said in a statement that he was "shocked and pleased, but mostly shocked. This is a wonderful honour."
Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems won for poetry. The Pulitzer for autobiography went to Tessa Hulls' multigenerational Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, her first book.
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Jeff Weingarten: In 1968, Maclean's magazine had published eight poems by John, and they prefaced that publication saying we never published poems and we're only publishing these because they're plain language. Anyone can read them, anyone can love them. And that to me sums up what's great about John's work. It's readable for the scholar, it's readable for the layperson. Anyone can pick up the poems and enjoy them. And the more time you spend with them, the more you'll find to love. There's a bit of an iceberg quality there, where you enjoy that first encounter, but the deeper you go, there's so much more. CN: When did you discover John Newlove? JW: The very first time was as assigned reading in my undergraduate [class] at the University of Toronto. But then a few years went by and as part of my masters I was expected to read very broadly and I came across him again at that point as a major voice of the 60s and 70s. 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I was emailing archives where I thought John might have written another poem and looked into their archives to see if John had letters there or I'd have friends and colleagues and writers say 'Oh, hey, like I have a couple letters from John if you want to take a look.' So they're from all over. CN: Who was he corresponding with in these letters? JW: A lot of different people, politicians and poets. He wrote letters to famous, well-known writers like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Al Purdy, a lot of these writers. They all ran in kind of the same circles and John was actually very good friends with quite a few of them. Atwood and John in particular were quite close for awhile. And so a lot of the letters are between poets and other writers, but publishers as well. He also worked as an editor at McLennan Stewart in Toronto. So he would be writing to poets or novelists as an editor, not as a friend or equal. And then he also has a lot of letters to family, also letters from fan mail students who would write him and ask, 'Where do the poems come from?' CN: How did you go about choosing which letters to include in the book? JW: That was really tough. There were about 3,000 letters I had to work through and I ended up with around 300. My main thing was I wanted the letters to be, I would describe it as kind of like a trinket store. You know, where you walk in and there's a bit of everything and you can pick whatever trinkets off the shelf that appeal to you as a reader. So some of the letters were about was John? What was he doing? How did he write? Some of them were about philosophy, like how did John and his contemporaries think about poems and writing? Others were about literary culture, like what was happening in Canada and Canadian history at that time. But then a lot of them are also about other things like John's struggle with mental illness and his mental health issues. John struggled with addiction and he was severely addicted to alcohol and cigarettes. I really wanted to show lots of different sides of the era and the person. I didn't want this to be just John and who was John as a poet, but who was John as a person? Who was the era? What was the era about? And I feel like the book shows a lot of different sides of people and the time. CN: Do you think that his alcohol addiction impacted his art at all? JW: Not necessarily his writing so much. He was very well known for having a totally tidy workspace and clean desk, clean little perimeter around his desk. No one could cross the perimeter. He lived there to write and no one bothered him. And at the same time throughout his career, as far as I'm aware, he would write sober. But when it came to other things, he worked drunk as an editor, he did talks drunk. He lived as a severe alcoholic and that got him into fights. He would really alienate a lot of people because he could be a pretty aggressive alcoholic when he was drunk, he could be very confrontational. There are letters in the book where he says, you know, I quit on Friday, but I got hired back on Monday after a big falling out with someone. So he had a lot of conflict with people and he alienated himself from a lot of people. CN: What do you think it is about letters that we find so interesting? JW: I say in the introduction to the book that it's like being a bit of a fly on the wall in the past. You get to see things that were never meant for public consumption, right? No one was ever meant to read these. There are poets who one day plan may say, 'Oh, I'm sure someone will read my letters.' They have that ego. But John especially did not have that ego. He writes openly. He doesn't think anyone will ever care about what he said. And so you find out, I think, things that John would never have said publicly about himself, about his family, about his writing. And I think you also get to really see kind of the person stripped bare. But I also think it's important to remember that, culturally, letters serve the function that nothing else could. There were no texts, there were no emails, there were no websites. Long distance calling was completely unaffordable. And many of these writers were so broke they didn't even have phones. A lot of the letters are letters of introduction, like, 'Hey, I read your poem from this issue of that magazine. I'm wondering if you wanna work on something with me.' There's fan mail or begging for money, there are even letters where he's writing to other poets saying, 'Hey, I'm broke, I can't afford groceries, could you send me a check?' So letters fulfilled a function that I think we really, really underestimate how important they were historically to form in community. So it's also like contemporary history.
