Percival Everett’s James won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction after the award committee’s board deadlocked on the three books that the fiction jury recommended, the New York Times reports.
James, published last March by Doubleday, is Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of the enslaved Jim. The novel’s Pulitzer win was not a surprise to literary observers: The book previously won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award, and it was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Speculation over the novel’s Pulitzer win began shortly after it was announced alongside three finalists: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961, and Gayl Jones’ The Unicorn Woman. The Pulitzer Prize typically names a winner and two finalists for its prizes, not a winner and three finalists.
On Literary Hub, podcaster and bookseller Drew Broussard wrote, “No matter how you slice it, this says to me to the 2025 Fiction Jury turned in what would have been a world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen, and the Board—one way or another—said ‘No.’”
According to the Times report, the jury presented the board with three finalists, the books by Bullwinkel, Levine, and Jones. But the board could not agree on a winner and asked the jury for another option, which turned out to be James.
Finalist Levine did not seem concerned about the process, telling the Times in an email, “Is this really the time to fuss about what might or might not be gender politics in a literary contest?”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
