Percival Everett has published more than 30 books, trained horses, restored guitars, painted abstract canvases, and once cared for a crow named Jim Crow. He has been called a literary genius, a philosopher-king of American fiction, and a satirist impossible to pin down—an author who writes westerns, spy thrillers, philosophical parables, and metafictional hand grenades. He is also, according to himself, “a dumb old cowboy,” a man with “work amnesia,” someone who claims to forget his books as soon as they’re published. “I’m pretty sure everything I’m writing is shit,” he told The New Yorker. “I’m just trying to make the best shit I can.”
Everett’s latest novel, James, reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who, in Twain’s version, serves mostly as a foil to Huck’s coming-of-age. In Everett’s hands, Jim is something else entirely—literate, cunning, deeply human, and sick of playing sidekick. The book was a finalist for the Booker Prize, won the National Book Award, and is now being adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg and Taika Waititi. Everett says he still doesn’t know if it was a good idea. “My wife, who is smarter than I am, said: ‘This is a great idea,’” he told The Guardian. “But I still am not so sure about it.”
Everett grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a house built by his grandfather, the son of a former slave. His father was a doctor. His sister became a doctor. He studied philosophy at the University of Miami, played jazz guitar in clubs to pay the bills, then drove west and never looked back. “All things move from east to west,” he once said. “The sun does, and so should we.” He’s lived most of his adult life in the western U.S.—New Mexico, Wyoming, Oregon, California—places where, as he told The New Yorker, he could be left alone, but also where he came to understand the myth of American individualism as something worth interrogating. Many of his books begin with characters seeking solitude and end with them forced into confrontation.
But Everett isn’t interested in tidy conclusions. “We abandon stories. They don’t end,” he told the Los Angeles Review of Books. His endings often contain deliberate ambiguity, moments that echo with unresolved tension. His entire career, in fact, seems designed to avoid narrative and professional containment. He once told Elle that he’s “so sick of slavery novels,” and then published James, a book about an enslaved man. He frequently pokes fun at the idea of genre, only to use its forms—westerns, thrillers, satires—as launchpads for something stranger. In Telephone, he released three different versions of the novel, each with a different ending. When asked about it, he didn’t explain. “I write a book hoping to get paid enough to write the next one,” he said. “I make art; that’s my job.”
Everett rarely explains his work, which only deepens the intrigue. His novels include Derrida-obsessed babies, philosophical horses, and mathematicians obsessed with nothing (as in, the literal concept of zero). He does not believe in the “ideal reader.” He doesn’t believe in literary rules. “No one has come up with something better than the standard workshop,” he told the LARB, “but I can’t stand it.”
Percival Everett’s daily writing routine
“I work all the time but only sometimes,” Everett told the Los Angeles Review of Books. This contradiction—part cowboy, part philosopher—also defines his routine. He writes with a pencil. He does not follow a schedule. He does not believe in writer’s block. “There’s no such thing,” he told Elle. “Write me 50 pages by Friday or you fail. And I’ll get pages. They might not be good pages, but you can work on bad pages. You can’t work on no pages.”
His habits were shaped in part by ranch life. For twelve years, Everett trained horses. “It’s like a novel,” he said. “Twelve hundred pounds, and it doesn’t have to do what I want it to do.” The lesson he learned: don’t get stressed. Whether it’s horses or books, losing your cool doesn’t help. “What if nobody likes it? What are you going to do? Maybe somebody will enjoy the next one.”
Instead of long uninterrupted writing sessions, Everett works in bursts—twenty minutes here, two hours there. He writes in between feeding animals, repairing guitars, and procrastinating. Sometimes that means smoking a cigar, sometimes it means fixing an old instrument, sometimes it means going to a movie if someone happens to ask. “I usually put my procrastination off until tomorrow,” he told The Guardian. “That way I get some things done.”
Everett does not think of writing as catharsis. He doesn’t use it to uncover truth. “What I love about writing novels is that I think I know something when I start, and by the time I finish, I realize I know less than I did when I started it,” he said. “You might as well embrace it.”
When asked what he knows less about after writing James, Everett didn’t hesitate. “Well, if I could say that,” he replied, “then I might know something.”
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