Percival Everett won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his novel James, a modern masterpiece that retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. On this week’s episode of Zero to Well-Read, Jeff and Rebecca discuss what Everett does with Jim’s interiority and intelligence that Twain couldn’t, how the novel’s central conceit literalizes W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness, and how Everett pulled off making a book that is layered and intellectually rich into a genuine page-turner.
In this companion piece to the episode, I’m sharing some Percival Everett trivia and interviews, some book awards tea, recs for retellings where side characters step to the front, and more.
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