Percival Everett has won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel “James,” a reimagining of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of the enslaved character Jim.
Along with Everett, the evening’s winners included Jason De León, who won the nonfiction prize for his book, “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” along with Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s “Kareem Between” for Young People’s Literature; Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s “Taiwan Travelogue” for Translated Literature and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Something About Living” for Poetry. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Black Classic Press publisher W. Paul Coates received the Literarian Award, a move that had caused controversy leading up to the event.
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Earlier this year, on the eve of the publication of his award-winning novel, Everett sat for a Zoom interview from his South Pasadena home with an array of stringed instruments and music books on the shelves behind him.
As the interview wrapped things up, Everett talked a bit more about books he liked, a formative reading experience, and some thoughts on music – as he’s a guitarist as well as painter, poet and novelist. The following Q&A, which has been edited for length and clarity, is from that March interview, published here for the first time.
Percival Everett, the author of more than 30 books, discusses his latest, “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” (Photo credit Michael Avedon / Courtesy of Doubleday)
Q. Is there a book that you often recommend to people?
Not one, no. I do love Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh.” It’s an amazing novel just for the story, but it’s also so funny. And so I read that, it used to be every year, but now it’s every couple of years. I’m just reminded of how quickly someone can really get a story going.
Q. Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life?
My father did, just because there were no restrictions as far as what I could pull from the library. And there was, and I don’t remember her name, a librarian – this would have been when I was a teenager – at the University of South Carolina McKissick Library. I shouldn’t have been in that library at all, but she would let me go into the stacks and I would just hang out up there for hours looking through books. I’m sure she’s dead now, but I would love to have had an opportunity to thank her.
Q. A librarian can make all the difference.
And a rulebreaker at that. [laughs]
Q. Is there a fact or piece of dialogue from something you’ve read that has stayed with you?
I’ve been reading about the lost Black composers of the period at the very end of the 19th century. There is a denial of the history of classical music in the U.S. Even one of my heroes, Leonard Bernstein, said at one point, ‘There is no classical music in the US before 1910; there’s no history of it.’
But there were actually Black composers, and they were encouraged by [Czech composer Antonín] Dvořák. Dvořák was brought to the U.S. to direct the National Conservatory in New York because this woman, [Jeannette] Thurber, and some other people believed that there was no serious music with an American character. They brought him in to direct it and to try to help shape it, and when he arrived, he and some other music people in New York, but especially Dvořák, stated that – and he was known for using the folk music of his world to create his orchestral music – he said that the music of America would come from African American and Native American melodies. And then proceeded to employ them.
One of the remarkable things, and this is the thing that I was coming to, is he wrote at that time, The New World Symphony, which is a fantastic work. When we listen to it now, you can’t help but think about Westerns. But it was written in 1893 – there were no Westerns! It’s got motifs of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and things like that in it; it’s just remarkable.
That denial of that influence in American music persists in the resistance of considering Gershwin a classical composer, or a Charles Ives. So there’s a lot of a lot of stuff going on there.
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Q. Speaking of music: Do you still play jazz guitar?
Oh, I love guitar. I do play and I play differently now since I chopped off the tip of a finger. So it feels different.
MORE: Click here to read the interview with Percival Everett about “James”
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