Percival Everett
United StatesAbout
Percival Everett is an acclaimed American novelist, short-story writer, and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Born in 1956 in Fort Gordon, Georgia, and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, he studied philosophy at the University of Miami before completing graduate studies in creative writing at Brown University. Everett is celebrated for his intellectual range, experimental storytelling, sharp satire, and fearless exploration of race, identity, and American culture. His extensive body of work spans literary fiction, philosophical novels, mysteries, and Westerns. His novels include Erasure (2001), adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction (2023), The Trees (2021), and James (2024), a radical reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. James won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Everett has also received the Windham-Campbell Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
