Author of ‘James’ — University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 2025-2026 Go Big Read book — Percival Everett discussed race and reading with UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin for the Go Big Read keynote address on Nov. 4.
‘James’ was released in 2024 as a re-imagining of Mark Twain’s classic novel, ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ Everett’s new take on the novel centers the perspective of Jim, a fugitive slave who adventures with Finn.
“[James] invites us to look at a traditional, so-called classic novel in a whole new way and to reflect on what stories get told, whose voices are heard and what we lose when some voices are silenced,” Mnookin said at the event.
Everett tied the education and literacy of Jim through ‘James’ to his hopes for a society that read more frequently.
The event was packed to the brim with every chair filled, and other visitors watched the interview from the back of Union South’s Varsity Hall or from a nearby overflow room.
Everett, who received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for ‘James’, said he was excited to hear UW distributed about 11,000 copies of the novel to students on campus in legal studies, history, landscape architecture and even chemistry courses.
He pointed out, however, that reading isn’t as popular as other forms of art or expression.
“I would love to live in a culture where we prize literature as much as we prize TV,” Everett said. “If any literary novel had performed like this, I’d be thrilled. It just happens to be my book.”
Everett encourages reading
Mnookin and Everett discussed how ‘James’ pushes readers to confront the complexities of an institution like slavery while examining the ways the book alters how readers think about language and collective knowledge.
Everett talked about how people tend to shy away from “hard” books, which he defined as books with difficult subject matter. He believes that has contributed to a lack of desire to read among a younger generation.
“It’s really hard to take difficult stuff and make it easy,” Everett said.
He emphasized his belief that shying away from the darker, more cruel horrors of history in literature is a form of erasure, which allows younger readers to ignore complex books and the history of these critical subjects.
“Reading is so important. Reading is the most subversive thing you can do in a culture,” Everett said. “There’s a reason that fascists burn books. They’re afraid of you reading. When you open a book, no one knows what it’s doing to you.”
“You might think that writing is the second most subversive thing you can do,” he continued, “but it’s belonging to a book group or a book club…When you start talking about art, you’re becoming collectively smarter, and that’s terrifying to authoritarians that want you to be as uneducated as you can be.”
51.5% of American adults said they read a book last year, while over 76% of Americans reported going to see a movie in a theater last year.
Research has repeatedly linked reading to increased cognitive abilities, stronger vocabulary and more robust logical thinking skills.
“I would love to live in a culture where we prize literature as much as we prize TV,” Everett said. “If any literary novel had performed like this, I’d be thrilled. It just happens to be my book.”
Writing ‘James’
Before writing ‘James,’ Everett said he read Huckleberry Finn about 15 times before the words began to blur together.
“The romantic answer would be that for years, I toiled with this idea, but that wouldn’t be true,” he said. “I was playing tennis, and I remember hitting a backhand cross-court shot well out of bounds. And I thought to myself, ‘has anyone ever told the story of Huck Finn from Jim’s point of view?’”
Later, he searched, realizing no one had. Then he got to work.
The novel Huckleberry Finn deals with adolescence and features a quintessential American adventure that created a novel revered among other classics.
An often ignored aspect of the American experience is race, Everett said, which he defined as a scientifically baseless social construction. ‘James’ does not shy away from conversations about race.
A main crux of the novel is that the enslaved characters have a specific vernacular, or ‘slave talk,’ that they speak in front of white people. Often, ‘slave talk’ was a made up form of communication to make enslaved people seem less intelligent than they are.
In some scenes, Jim reads and speaks in an intelligent way with other enslaved people, while he speaks in ‘slave talk’ to white people. At one point, Jim tells his daughter that “white folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say, ‘when they don’t feel superior.’”
As an enslaved person in that period, Jim would have been expected to be illiterate. It is a surprise and a subversion, however, when readers learn he is fully literate and speaks standard English.
By reading, Jim is able to produce what Everett calls “a free space in his mind” where he has a semblance of the freedom he should have had, teaching readers not to take their literacy and education for granted.
Everett viewed the writing process for ‘James’ not as a corrective, but more so as “entering into a dialogue, a conversation, with Twain,” he said.
Everett’s writing journey
Everett grew up in Columbia, South Carolina as a voracious reader, influenced by his father and grandfather. He lauded his schoolteachers and librarians for allowing him to foster his love of reading by speaking with him about literature.
When asked what his advice was to aspiring writers, Everett said that reading is the most important way to inspire good, creative thinking that aids the writing process.
“It’s completely undisciplined,” he said of his writing process. “Every time I do it, I’m making it up. That’s the thrill of it. I don’t know how to make a novel; I know that I can do it. And if I had a formula to do it, I probably would never do it.”
He prefers to write in small bursts and is able to write anywhere, anytime.
“I don’t believe in writer’s block,” he said. “When I’m stuck, I can write something else.”
