📝 Percival Everett’s Writing Routine

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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.”

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