Percival Everett facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Percival Everett
|
|
|---|---|
Everett in 2022
|
|
| Born | December 22, 1956 Fort Gordon, Georgia, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, story writer |
| Education | University of Miami (BA) Brown University (MA) |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Notable awards | Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, 2023 |
Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
Personal life and education
Percival L. Everett, named after his father, was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his father, Percival Leonard Everett, was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. His mother was Dorothy (née Stinson) Everett. When the younger Everett was still an infant, the family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where the boy lived through high school. He was the oldest of several children. His father became a dentist and his parents continued to live in South Carolina. The younger Everett eventually moved to the American West.
Everett earned a bachelors in philosophy from the University of Miami. He studied a broad variety of topics including biochemistry and mathematical logic.
He earned an M.A. in fiction from Brown University in 1982.
He now lives in Los Angeles, California.
Personal life
Everett was born in Georgia. He then moved to South Carolina and then Wyoming. Everett now lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna.
Literary career
While completing his MA degree at Brown University, Everett wrote his first novel, Suder (1983), about Craig Suder, a Seattle Mariners third baseman in a major league slump, both on and off the field. Everett's second novel, Walk Me to the Distance (1985), features veteran David Larson after his return from Vietnam. Larson becomes involved in a search for the developmentally disabled son of a sheep rancher. The novel was later adapted with an altered plot as an ABC-TV movie entitled Follow Your Heart.
Cutting Lisa (1986; re-issued 2000) begins with John Livesey meeting a man who has performed a Caesarean section. This prompts the protagonist to evaluate his relationships.
In 1987, Everett published The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories, a collection of short stories. In 1990, Everett published two books re-fashioning Greek myths: Zulus, which combines the grotesque and the apocalypse; and For Her Dark Skin, a new version of Medea by the Greek playwright Euripides.
Switching genres, Everett next wrote a children's book, The One That Got Away (1992), an illustrated book for young readers that follows three cowboys as they attempt to corral "ones", the mischievous numerals.
Returning to novels, Everett published his first book-length western, God's Country, in 1994. In this novel, Curt Marder and his tracker Bubba search "God's country" for Marder's wife, who has been kidnapped by bandits. Marder is not sure whether he wants to find her. The book is a parody of westerns and the politics of race and gender.
In 1996, Everett published two books: Watershed has a contemporary western setting, in which the loner hydrologist Robert Hawkes meets a Native American "small person", who helps him come to terms with the inter-relation of people. That year, Everett also published his second collection of stories, Big Picture.
In Frenzy (1997), Everett returned to Greek mythology. Vlepo, Dionysos' assistant, is forced to experience a "frenzy" of odd activities, including becoming lice and bedroom curtains at different times during the story, which he narrates. This occurs so he can explain what the experiences are like to Dionysos, the half-god.
Glyph (1999) is the story within a story of Ralph, a baby who chooses not to speak but has extraordinary muscle-control and an IQ nearing 500, which he uses to write notes to his mother on a variety of literary topics based on books she supplies. Ralph is kidnapped a variety of times due to his special skills, and his odyssey (as "written" by four-year-old Ralph) teaches him more about love than intellect.
Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001) is Everett's first novella. In it, Rhino Tanner attempts to tame Mother Nature with a commercialization of the Grand Canyon.
Everett also published in 2001 the novel Erasure, in which he portrays how the publishing industry pigeon-holes African-American writers. The novel, a metafictional piece, satirically revolves around a novella written by the main character entitled My Pafology.
A History of the African-American People (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004) is an epistolary novel that chronicles the characters Percival Everett and James Kincaid as they work with Strom Thurmond (occasionally) and his aide's crazy assistant, Barton Wilkes. The latter orders the authors around even as he stalks them.
Also in 2004, Everett released American Desert and Damned If I Do: Stories, another collection of short stories. In American Desert, Street undergoes an odyssey of self-discovery about what being alive really means, exploring religion, revelation, faith, zealotry, love, family, media sensationalism, and death.
Wounded: A Novel (2005) tells the story of John Hunt, a horse trainer confronted with hate crimes against a homosexual and a Native American.
Everett's 2006 collection of poetry, re:f (gesture), features one of his paintings on the front cover. His latest poetry book, Swimming Swimmers Swimming, was published in 2010 by Red Hen Press.
In 2009, Graywolf Press released I Am Not Sidney Poitier. The protagonist, with the name Not Sidney Poitier and a resemblance to the actor with a similar name, meets challenges relating to identity and racial segregation across North America. He faces similar challenges with identity construction in relation to his adopted father, Ted Turner.
Assumption: A Novel (2011) is a triptych of stories with some characters who have been in earlier Everett stories. "Big" returns to the character of Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town. He is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution.
In February 2013, Graywolf Press published Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.
In 2021, Graywolf Press published The Trees. The novel won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
Dr. No, published by Graywolf Press in 2022, won the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was named a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics award for fiction.
Everett is the recipient of a 2023 Windham Campbell Prize for fiction.
In 2023 the film American Fiction was released, with a screenplay adapted by its director Cord Jefferson from Everett's novel Erasure.
James, published by Doubleday in 2024, tells the story of Huckleberry Finn's companion "Jim" from Jim's point of view.
Awards and honors
- Everett's stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories
- 1990: New American Writing Award for Zulus
- 1996: PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for Big Picture
- 2001: Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters for Erasure
- 2002: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction for Erasure
- 2006: PEN Center USA Award for Fiction for Wounded
- 2008: Received an honorary doctorate from the College of Santa Fe
- 2010: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction for I Am Not Sidney Poitier
- 2010: Winner of the Believer Book Award for I Am Not Sidney Poitier
- 2010: Winner of the 29th Dos Passos Prize
- 2010: Winner of the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for foreign fiction translated into Italian for Wounded (Ferito), translated by Marco Rossari
- 2015: Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction
- 2015: Awarded Phi Kappa Phi Presidential Medallion from the University of Southern California
- 2016: Creative Capital Award
- 2018: PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for So Much Blue
- 2021: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Telephone
- 2021: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction for Telephone
- 2022: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Trees
- 2022: Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for The Trees
- 2022: Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Dr. No
- 2023: Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction
- 2023: PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
- 2023: Los Angeles Review of Books/UCR Lifetime Achievement Award
