“Huckleberry Finn” from Another Point of View

Percival Everett received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction for his reworking of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. James, as the title implies, looks at the events of the book through the eyes of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies Huck on his raft ride when he runs away.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an American classic, published in 1884 but set in the 1830s in the American South before the Civil War. In it, Huck runs away from his violent father and is accompanied by  Jim, an enslaved man who is at risk of being sold and moved away from his family. For its time, it was considered an anti-slavery work. Huck, 13 years old and a poor, uneducated white boy, originally helps Jim almost by accident, but as the book goes on, questions the morality of enslavement.

But by today's standards, Jim lacks agency and Everett saw a chance to give him a voice. Or rather two voices. James, as he perceives himself, has learned to read in secret, and therefore can speak standard English. But he explains to children in the novel that it is better to speak in an uneducated way in front of white folks, to let them feel superior. He calls this way of speaking the "slave filter": "White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us."

An extract on this theme was read by actor Nonso Anozie when James was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize:

The novel has been described as a reworking of Huck Finn. The Pulitzer committee called it a "reconsideration". But Everett, who loved Twain's novel as a child, says, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain."

Here is Percival Everett in conversation with journalist Jeffrey Brown on PBS News Hour.

Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has written 24 novels. American Fiction, adapted from his novel Erasure, became an Oscar-winning film in 2023.

You can read another extract from James on the Booker Prize site.