‘I hate Tom Sawyer’: Percival Everett, who won Pulitzer for reimagining Huckleberry Finn, drops in at JLF 2026
Sidelights from the Jaipur Literature Festival: Brief encounters and moments beyond the main stage.
Asked how often he re-read Huckleberry Finn while writing James, Everett was characteristically precise: “Exactly 15 times.” The goal, he explained, was distance. “Ten times is probably love.”
Percival Everett, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel James, kept participants at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF, 2026) guessing for a day over his non-arrival, and then teased them on Friday by appearing over a video link for a few minutes.
Everett, whose 2024 book James is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by his fugitive slave, appeared on-screen for just a few minutes, long enough to apologise, provoke, and vanish again.
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Speaking about language and power, Everett reflected on how people who are oppressed or imprisoned “find a way,” including a way to speak the way your “enemy expects you to speak.”
Asked how often he re-read Huckleberry Finn while writing James, Everett was characteristically precise: “Exactly 15 times.” The goal, he explained, was distance. “Ten times is probably love.”
He was equally unsentimental about Twain’s legacy. Huckleberry Finnis “important,” Everett said, “but it’s not the greatest work of art.” One reason, he added flatly: “I hate Tom Sawyer.”
Everett closed with a brisk theory of authorship that drew knowing laughter from the room. Readers, he said, matter far more than writers. “I don’t know what any of my books mean. I wait for the readers to tell me,” he said, pausing just long enough before delivering the punchline: “And then I take credit for it.”
Standing room only — including for the panelists
At another venue across the festival grounds, the session ‘God Particle: The Story of Everything’ was so oversubscribed that Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician and broadcaster, and one of the panel’s central figures, was briefly stopped at the door by staff and asked to wait.
Only after explaining that he was one of the speakers was du Sautoy and his fellow panellists allowed inside. The conversation, featuring CERN physicist Archana Sharma and astrophysicist Geraint Lewis, set out to bridge the smallest constituents of matter and the largest structures in the cosmos.
Asked how often he re-read Huckleberry Finn while writing James, Everett was characteristically precise: “Exactly 15 times.” The goal, he explained, was distance. “Ten times is probably love.”
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