Which Percival Everett novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025? The answer is James. The Pulitzer honored Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told largely through the perspective of Jim, the enslaved character whose agency and inner life Twain’s original leaves largely unexplored.
Published by Doubleday in 2024, James follows Jim after he learns he may be sold away from his wife and daughter. He escapes, while Huck also flees his abusive father, setting up a journey down the Mississippi. Everett uses the familiar plot to examine literacy, racial violence, family, freedom and the ways language can enforce or resist racial hierarchy.
A common mix-up is Telephone, which was a 2021 Pulitzer Fiction finalist, not the 2025 winner. Erasure is another Everett novel, and it inspired the Oscar-winning film American Fiction, but it did not win the Pulitzer. Dr. No was also a finalist for other literary honors, not this prize.