Supposedly Fun

The announcement of the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes seemed to go as usual, running through all categories before culminating in the award for fiction. Many people who watched the broadcast probably didn’t think there was anything unusual (other than, perhaps, the tie in the history category and the fact that a graphic memoir won in the memoir and autobiography category). For Pulitzer Prize enthusiasts, however, the fiction category was shocking, instantly sparking a wave of speculation (I even mentioned it in my reaction video).

History will likely see the winner as a foregone conclusion, an easy decision recognizing a novel poised to be a classic of American literature. It’s easy to see an outcome as inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. Here, in the moment, it didn’t feel like Percival Everett’s James was a shoo-in given recent decisions by the Pulitzer Board and juries–and the finalists reveal that it is incredibly likely we almost didn’t get this outcome at all. In the hours since the announcement, speculation has turned into fact: James, by Percival Everett, almost didn’t win.

All this was revealed simply because of the nature of the finalists.

In this deep dive, we’ll talk about James, Percival Everett, and what might have gone down to nearly derail this book as a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner. In this discussion, we’ll have to talk about the state of literature, what a book prize is intended to recognize, and if popularity should be disqualifying. And I’m going to get pretty annoyed about it.

You can buy a copy of James in hardcover here, or as an ebook here.

What’s the Fuss About the Finalists?

You’re probably wondering how people knew something was up simply because of the finalists. It’s because of the number of finalists revealed before the winner was announced. There were four of them. And that’s odd, because there are only supposed to be three.

I’m a bit lucky here because the good folks at Lit Hub did the hard work of digging into the official rules for a post they did about this. Here’s the relevant passage they dug up: “Each jury is required to offer three nominations but in no order of preference, although the jury chair in a report accompanying the submission can broadly reflect the views of the members.”

Three finalists. Look back at past years of Pulitzer results in the fiction category and you’ll only see four finalists in 2025, 2015, and 1992. That’s only three times since the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction started revealing the finalists in 1980. And that’s why Pulitzer enthusiasts and journalists could immediately suss out that something had gone on behind the scenes. But what happened?

How James Almost Didn’t Win the Pulitzer

It’s probably worth briefly covering how the Pulitzers work. Each category has a jury. That jury reviews the submissions and selects three finalists to submit to the Pulitzer Board. The Board is responsible for picking the winners (or deciding not to award a prize that year).

Let’s go back to the rules that Lit Hub dug up: “Awards are made by majority vote, but the Board is also empowered to vote ‘no award,’ or by three-fourths vote to select an entry that has not been nominated. If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury, it can ask the Administrator to consult with the chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries. Meanwhile, the deliberations continue.”

What does this mean? It means one of the finalists wasn’t originally there, since (again) there are only supposed to be three. Since James was clearly able to get a majority of the Board’s vote, it stands to reason that James is the one missing from the original set of three. In an ordinary Pulitzer year, we would be left wondering if the Board went rogue and identified their own winner, or if the jury put James forward after being asked for an alternate. The Pulitzer is a pretty opaque institution. They don’t offer glimpses behind the curtain, and it seems anyone involved is under a serious NDA to avoid leaks. But this year, we got answers when The New York Times proved that an additional finalist was called in, and that this additional finalist was indeed James:

But it turns out that “James” was not the top pick among the Pulitzer’s five fiction jury members. It wasn’t even in the top three, according to three people with knowledge of the process, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential deliberations.

In a surprising twist, the prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board failed to reach a consensus on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented — Rita Bullwinkel’s “Headshot,” Stacey Levine’s “Mice 1961,” and Gayl Jones’s “The Unicorn Woman.”

In the hours after the announcement, many speculated that the Board did an end run around the jury to bestow the prize to James, but that turned out not to be the case. Remember, in the rules that Lit Hub dug up, the Board can choose their own winner if they get three-fourths of the Board to vote for that option. They also have the option to vote not to give an award at all, but after the massive controversy that followed the lack of a prize for fiction in 2012, I can’t imagine a Board deciding to go that route. According to The New York Times, the third option is what happened this year: the Board asked the Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Marjorie Miller, to approach the fiction jury chair, Merve Emre, to get an additional book for the Board to consider.

What we don’t know is how that conversation went or how specific it was. Was James legitimately the fourth choice of the jury? Did the Board and/or Marjorie Miller specifically ask about James, or request that it be submitted as an alternate? We will probably never know, which means we will have to wonder to what degree James won at the behest of the Board.

What we do know, thanks to The New York Times, is how this went down in the voting, and that James was added as an alternate earlier this year. Here’s how their report indicates things went down:

In a typical year, one of the three finalists is chosen. But when the 17 voting members of the board deliberated on the fiction finalists last Friday, none of the three choices received a majority vote. At that point, the board could have voted not to award a fiction prize this year, as it has on rare occasions. Or it could vote to consider a fourth choice, which had also been chosen by the fiction jury.

In this case, the board voted to consider the fourth selection, “James,” which was submitted as an additional option earlier this year, after the board got the list of finalists and asked the jury for another title to consider. “James” got the necessary majority vote.

So we know that James was added as an alternate early on, but it appears the Board still had to vote on the original three finalists first. James could only be added to the process after none of the original three got a majority of votes from the Board, at which point it appears James won handily.

Why Am I Annoyed by This?

It’s wild that a book widely considered to be a future classic of American literature, one of the most (if not the most) critically acclaimed and lauded titles of 2024, written by an author who has become one of the most renowned in the world, came so close to being completely overlooked by the Pulitzer Prize–an award that was created to recognize great American literature and identify future American classics in real time.

After Night Watch was announced as last year’s winner and I hated it, I made a post questioning whether or not the Pulitzer is in trouble. In that post, I talk a great deal about the inconsistency of the Pulitzer Prize over the last decade. Here’s a passage from that post:

The biggest successes, the ones that are most likely to stand the test of time, are the most obvious winners. All the Light We Cannot See, The Underground Railroad, Trust, and Demon Copperhead were all among the most prominent, most critically rewarded titles of their years. The Pulitzer seems to lose its footing as soon as it strays from that formula. It’s almost as if the Pulitzer doesn’t know what it should be doing anymore.

I went on to make a case that modern fiction juries seem determined not to bow to public perception. Even in years with a wide array of solid contenders, they just want to go their own way. In 2022, we had The Love Songs of W.E.B. du Bois, The Trees (another Percival Everett novel), Crossroads, Great Circle, and Matrix. We ended up with three largely unknown finalists and The Netanyahus as the winner.

Last year’s prize could have gone to any one of several incredible fictions published in 2023: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, North Woods, Tom Lake, Absolution, Biography of X, Blackouts, Chain-Gang All Stars, and This Other Eden. Instead, we got another batch of largely unknown finalists and Night Watch emerged victorious.

I do want to acknowledge that judging the best literature in a given year is incredibly subjective. When juror Michael Cunningham spoke out after the 2012 debacle, he noted that when he and his fellow jurors began meeting, they first had to decide what was important for them to recognize–and that bears out in their three choices (most significantly with The Pale King to acknowledge a late literary genius as well as the editor who managed to make his notes into a book, and seeking to recognize an up-and-coming new literary talent by including Swamplandia!).

The problem is that recent fiction juries for the Pulitzer appear to automatically reject books that are popular or that have achieved a consensus of acclaim (the year where Trust and Demon Copperhead tied is an obvious exception). Instead, juries have taken a somewhat scolding tone, as if each batch of finalists is their way of saying, “these are the books and authors we think you should be paying attention to.”

This year’s jury was no different. Of course, there was always a possibility that James wouldn’t win, but the jury appears to have gone out of its way to avoid anything that could have been seen as a frontrunner. To me, that’s just silly.

Here Comes the Rant

Imagine if fiction jurors all the way back thought this way, that popular or critically acclaimed books should be ignored. We wouldn’t have Pulitzer wins for The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved, or To Kill a Mockingbird–books often included in conversations about the best American (or even global) literature of all time. If we barred bestsellers, we wouldn’t have Now in November, and Booth Tarkington wouldn’t be one of the few authors to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction would not be doing its job if it deliberately overlooked the most critically acclaimed books of any given year.

I got even more irritated about the whole thing when The New York Times quoted an Instagram post from the chair of this year’s fiction jury, Merve Emre. Here’s the full text of the post:

It was a peculiar privilege to serve as the chair of jurors for the 2025 Pulitzer in Fiction. Five of us — me, Ayana, Bryan, Jonathan, Laila — rummaged through six-hundred or so books and chose four that represented “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” To view the field of literature from such a wide vantage point was necessarily to trace patterns and resemblances. It was difficult to avoid fatigue and cynicism. American publishing is not in a healthy state; the more directly its judgments are determined by the market and the mass media — the more sources of funding, like the NEA, disappear — the sicker it will become: homogenous, inert, inexpert, cheap. Yet this means that when a book truly excites you, when it shocks, amuses, and makes you think hard, then you feel certain of its importance. Congratulations to our three extraordinary finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s HEADSHOT, Gayl Jones’s THE UNICORN WOMAN, Stacey Levine’s MICE 1961, and to the winner, Percival Everett’s JAMES.

What an incredible slap at publishing. The publishing industry is significantly larger than when the Pulitzer Prizes were created over a hundred years ago. And while the big companies have consolidated and very few aren’t owned by another corporation, there are more imprints and avenues to reach more readers than any other time in history. Clearly, Merve Emre would disagree, but that’s a good thing. Publishers are appealing to more readers and getting better at reflecting diverse authors and stories.

If bookstores and bestseller lists feel cram-jam full of romantasy, romance, mysteries, and trippy psychological thrillers, who cares? People are buying those books, they’re reading those books, and they want more of those books. Those books are keeping independent bookstores and the publishing industry alive. Merve Emre can scoff at how some of the bestselling books of the last 20 years are Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey, and were written by Colleen Hoover and Rebecca Yarros, but those books move in big numbers, and they keep their readers wanting more. The Fifty Shades of Grey series made so much money for Random House that it could give all of its employees a $5,000 bonus for the holidays.

Merve Emre should know this, but these massively popular books allow publishers to cover the cost of making other books that are more of a gamble because they don’t have to be so concerned with losing money.

I get really annoyed when people feel like they need to police what other people are reading, so that Instagram post really set me off. And it’s all part of this ridiculous moral panic people have been having for centuries that people, and the arts along with them, are getting dumber. I even had a commenter recently tell me that the state of literature is appalling. Look, I don’t want to have to convince anyone that there are good books out there. I talk about a lot of them on my channel, and I’ve read some incredible books that were published this year. If you want to believe that books are terrible these days, I don’t feel like debating that because it’s an outlandish and facile claim.

Literature evolves, just like any other medium of art. Go to any museum and walk through all the different art movements to see this. If you like early twentieth-century literature, that’s fine. Good for you. Early twentieth-century literature is lit. But it doesn’t mean contemporary fiction is bad if it doesn’t look like what Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, or Willa Cather were publishing–just like early twentieth-century literature isn’t bad if it doesn’t look like the work of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, or Jane Austen.

You can like what you like, but don’t try to yuck anybody’s yum. Who cares if TikTok had a moment where it was super into Colleen Hoover, crash-landing her onto bestseller lists? You don’t have to read Colleen Hoover if you don’t want to. I haven’t. But I would also never say that anyone who does is wrong.

Circling back, I might be reading into this a bit, because by the time I got to the end of Merve Emre’s Instagram post I was already irritated, but I also don’t like the smug conclusion: “Congratulations to our three extraordinary finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s HEADSHOT, Gayl Jones’s THE UNICORN WOMAN, Stacey Levine’s MICE 1961, and to the winner, Percival Everett’s JAMES.” Really? The finalists are “extraordinary,” but the winner is just “the winner?” It kinda sounds like someone is annoyed that she had to put James forward to the Board.

The real irony there, as pointed out by emergencybraks on a Pulitzer Discord group I’m in, is that Percival Everett is not an author who was made popular by the market and mass media. Everett has been publishing books since 1983–as long as I’ve been alive–and he only got popular in the last five years–and even that is a bit of a fluke. He was with independent publishers for most of his career–he only switched to a major publisher for James. But in 2021, he became a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Telephone, and later that year, he released The Trees, which went on to be a finalist for the Booker Prize and sparked a lot of speculation that he might win a Pulitzer.

Percival Everett’s books have covered a wide range of genres and styles (the book he published between The Trees and James was Dr. No, a spy satire). He is not what you think of when you think of a mainstream author, but through the strength of his talent, he somehow became a wildly popular household name. Why would you hold that against him?

Circling back to a point earlier in this rant, recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jurors seem to have decided that they should use that platform to act as tastemakers. They want to show you books that you may have overlooked. Occasionally, that works out–Tinkers is the classic example of a book that was overlooked but has stood the test of time as a worthy Pulitzer winner. More often, it feels like the jury lived through a completely different reading year from the rest of us. And that should stop.

Ultimately, we should all be grateful for whatever degree of cajoling the Board and the Administrator used to get James across the finish line.

And listen, while I’m on a rant, I’ve already gotten a bunch of comments on my reaction video saying that James isn’t creative, that doing a spin on a classic novel isn’t clever or worthy of attention, or some variation on that theme. So before you type that angry comment you’re just itching to leave, don’t. Just don’t. I’ve already spent too much time responding to that facile line of thinking. You might think it’s some sort of “gotcha” line. It’s not. It’s silly.

Furthermore, I’ve also gotten a lot of comments that James isn’t a good book because it isn’t a novel so much as a political exercise, foisting modern thinking on an older time. Comments that claim that anyone who likes James only likes it because it fits their politics. Look, there is a way of writing historical fiction badly by making the characters have behaviors and attitudes that just aren’t of the time. That’s not really the point of James. Whether you like it or not, as I said at the top, Huckleberry Finn has become a complicated classic. James is in dialogue with it, using Percival Everett’s razor-sharp wit to take the story to places Mark Twain couldn’t have. Twain couldn’t have reflected the actual darkness of what life was like for the enslaved. People wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. Publishers likely wouldn’t have printed it. But Everett can. He can make readers think about what James’ life would have been like, and the toll it would have taken on him. If you think that’s politicizing an issue, don’t bother leaving me a comment. That’s not me being woke, that’s you thinking that learning about the past is bad.

To sum up: can’t we all just be non-judgmental book nerd friends? And listen, I know I really disliked last year’s winner and threw the book at the end of my deep dive. But believe it or not, I try to leave room for other opinions. If you like Night Watch, that’s great. I really didn’t. If you don’t like James (for legitimate reasons), that’s fine. I can still like it. We don’t have to agree–and we don’t need to slander popular books. That’s hot nonsense.

What Is James About?

It’s hard to imagine any book enthusiast who doesn’t know what James is about in 2025, given that we’ve all been hearing about this book for over a year at this point. It had incredible buzz before it was published in March of 2024, it was released to a remarkable wave of acclaim, and as the year wore on, the momentum just kept building. James was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the National Book Award for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize.

It’s inspired by a book with a complicated place in the canon of American literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. We don’t have to debate Mark Twain’s intentions here, suffice to say that although Twain had good intentions at the time, his use of vernacular (including the n word) and the stereotypical depiction of Jim, an enslaved man who unwittingly becomes Huckleberry Finn’s sidekick, have made the book a source of heated discussion and debate.

Percival Everett, whose work frequently explores issues of race, identity, and the cultural legacies of racism, enters the chat with James, a novel that is a bit of a retelling of Twain’s classic, but also a bit of a revision, and a bit of a reconsideration. This is achieved by centering Jim, who comes to be known by his full name over the course of the novel, and revealing that the ignorant, stereotypical character Twain created is a carefully constructed facade designed to keep James out of trouble. He code switches so that white people will see him as a harmless, ignorant, and compliant worker while in reality, he’s highly intelligent, analytical, and angry. And in an early scene in the book, he teaches his children that they must also learn how to code-switch to survive. It’s a perfect encapsulation of what Everett achieves in James because that scene is surprising, devastating, and also somehow funny.

I also love how the novel opens by turning a scene from Huckleberry Finn on its head. At the beginning of Twain’s novel, Huck and his friend Tom Sawyer play a prank on Jim by hiding in the shadows where Jim is waiting on Miss Watson. The first sentence of James is “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” James knows exactly what the two kids are up to, and he plays along because “It always pays to give white folks what they want.”

Throughout the novel, James reflects on language and how powerful it is to be able to tell your story. He also finds himself in absurd, comical situations (like being forced to perform in blackface for an audience of white people) that key into both Twain’s sense of satire and Everett’s. He finds danger (for example, the violence that white men commit when they think a black man is trying to educate himself), and Everett leads the reader to a conclusion that bloodily departs from the happy ending that Twain offered in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Taking a character who has been the gold standard for stereotypical (racist) depictions of black people and adding hidden depths to show what his life would have been more like adds necessary perspective and forces people into dialogue with our history and the messaging we’ve tacitly accepted for so long.

Why Did This Win a Pulitzer Prize?

The short answer here is that James won because the Board either knew it deserved to win or that history (and even contemporary society) would have looked badly at a deserving novel like this being overlooked.

The longer answer is that James has been fairly (I think) awarded the status of instant classic. The headline of the review in The New York Times Book Review proclaimed, “‘Huck Finn’ Is a Masterpiece. This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” That review goes on to say the following:

What sets “James” above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up. This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful. Beneath the wordplay, and below the packed dirt floor of Everett’s moral sensibility, James is an intensely imagined human being.

… He is not scoring easy points. He is evoking and critiquing the American experiment, circa the middle of the 19th century, from a wised-up slave’s point of view.

That last part should have been catnip for the Pulitzer Prize, which is mandated to recognize “distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”

And it isn’t just critics who fell hard for James. When The New York Times Book Review asked readers to submit their own list of the best books of the 21st century, James appeared at #50–a book published only four months earlier made it halfway up the list. And for what it’s worth, the Book Review had been compiling their list for months by the time they released it, so there’s no way of knowing if it would have appeared there had it not been published during the voting window (as it is, Everett did appear at #20 for Erasure, and James was recommended in the list twice).

I’m harping on this because that is the level of confidence people have that James is destined to be an American classic. And that’s why it’s confounding that the jury tried to overlook it.

Is This Novel Any Good?

Given how much I’ve gushed about James, it may surprise you to hear that I wasn’t so sure about it when I first finished it. This is where we’ll get into spoiler territory, so if you want to avoid that, go ahead and skip to the next section.

The ending of James radically departs from Huckleberry Finn. While Twain ended his novel with a convoluted happy conclusion, in which Huck and Tom Sawyer save the day and Jim is freed, James is significantly darker; first of all, Huck and James are separated for a time, and we learn that James experiences horrible things while Huck is off having the adventure Mark Twain wrote about. Among the traumatic things that James encounters is witnessing the murder of an enslaved woman named Sammy (who briefly joined up with James), followed by a riverboat accident that forces him to choose who to save: Huck, who reappears in danger of drowning, and the black man who has been traveling with him. He chooses Huck but feels guilty about letting the other man drown. James reveals that he is Huck’s biological father but leaves him behind when he sets off to rescue his wife and daughter, who had been sold.

I know I’m doing a rundown of the whole ending of the book, but I feel like this context is very important for what happens next: James murders a man he witnessed sexually assaulting an enslaved woman and leads a rebellion against the plantation where his wife and daughter are being kept. He murders the overseer and torches the plantation, then escapes to Iowa (a free state) with his family. The book ends when the sheriff of the town they arrive in approaches:

“Runaways?” he asked.

“We are,” I said.

“Any of you named N____r Jim?”

I pointed to each of us. “Sadie, Lizzie, Morris, Buck.”

“And who are you?”

“I am James?”

“James what?”

“Just James.”

I was thrown by the ending at first because it’s dark. When I talked about it in a Friday Reads video, I believe I described it as having turned into a Quentin Tarantino movie. And I don’t like Quentin Tarantino. So over the summer, I described myself as having mixed feelings about James. But let me tell you something: this book haunted me. It wasn’t just the ending, it was a lot of the things James survives during the novel, and how traumatic those experiences would be. And I came to understand how a lifetime of pretending, placating, and playing by the rules didn’t actually save James from anything. I thought about the growing sense of anger, disappointment, and disillusionment bubbling up inside James as these traumas pile up. That’s why the context leading up to the bloody conclusion is important. There was no way James could go back to being the man he was on the first page. He’s seen too much. He’s learned the power of being able to tell his own story (which metaphorically translates to having agency over his own life).

I also think Everett needed to depart from the ending of Mark Twain’s book. It’s not a conclusion that you can put a clever spin on without sacrificing the integrity of Everett’s project. I have come to think that an essential ingredient in James‘s success is that it startles you out of complacency. It forces you to think about the unpleasant realities of the lives enslaved people like James faced. In that way, I think it’s fair to say that James is a spiritual cousin of another Pulitzer Prize-winner: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. And that’s good company to keep.

I went from having complicated feelings about James to being an ardent fan. I’m so happy that it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and I’m annoyed by the roundabout way it got to the podium.

Who Is Percival Everett?

I’ve already talked a lot, so I’ll keep this brief. Everett has published 24 novels at the time I am writing this, in addition to four short story collections and seven volumes of poetry (plus one children’s book). His work covers a wide variety of genres, covering everything from westerns to mysteries, satire to philosophy. He described himself to the BBC as “pathologically ironic,” which appears across all his writing. His main themes are race and identity in the United States.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy but also studied biochemistry and mathematical logic before earning a master’s degree in fiction. That range probably goes a long way toward explaining why he’s such an interesting person (not to mention the experimental nature of much of his writing).

He is married to the novelist Danzy Senna and although I haven’t read any of her books yet, the plot descriptions make it sound like a perfect union.

Is James the Great American Novel?

Future generations will have the final say here, but if any book has a shot at being in the conversation, it’s James.

What Was James‘ Competition for the Pulitzer?

Let’s start with the original three finalists selected by the fiction jury: Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine, and The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones. It’s not altogether surprising to see Headshot or The Unicorn Woman here because Headshot was longlisted for the Booker Prize and had many ardent fans in 2024, while Gayl Jones was a surprise finalist in 2022–prompting the literary community to begin elevating her as a classic American author. I included both of those books in my Pulitzer prediction for 2025 (Headshot in the ‘Potential Surprise Winner” category and The Unicorn Woman under “Previous Finalists”).

Mice 1961 is the total jaw-dropper because in the days since the Pulitzer announcement, I have yet to come across anyone who had read (or even heard of) this book before it was revealed as a finalist. Had it won, it would have been the biggest surprise since Tinkers.

Outside of the finalists, many people were beginning to think that Miranda July was barnstorming her way to an upset for her novel All Fours, which just kept showing up on best-of lists and award lists. We also had a previous finalist earning acclaim in Tommy Orange, who released Wandering Stars (a sequel/prequel hybrid to There There, which was a finalist in 2019). There was also much speculation about whether Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! or Hisham Matar’s My Friends would show up despite neither book feeling much like a ‘Pulitzer book.’

I think you could round out the most likely contenders for 2024 with Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise, Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, Jessica Anthony’s The Most, and Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

Should James Have Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

I think we’ve established that the answer is yes. I would put James far above any other contender for this year. And as I said, I think it would have been an embarrassment for the Pulitzer not to recognize Percival Everett for James.

Just for the hell of it, my finalists would have been Wandering Stars and The History of Sound. But I wouldn’t let anything get in the way of James.

And now that he has a Pulitzer in hand, we just need to work on getting Percival Everett a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Other Pulitzer Prize Deep Dives

His Family (1918) • Now in November (1935) • Gone With the Wind (1937) • The Grapes of Wrath (1940) • To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) • The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983) • Lonesome Dove (1986) • Interpreter of Maladies (2000) • March (2006) • Tinkers (2010) • Less (2018) • The Netanyahus (2022) • TIE: Trust and Demon Copperhead (2023) • Night Watch (2024)

Deep Dives On Pulitzer Years With No Winner

1917 • 2012