The Pulitzer Prize jury described ‘James’ as “a perfect recreation of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ that “gives Jim the space to demonstrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and offers a new approach to the search for family and freedom.”
‘James’, a winner of both the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, was published in Portugal last March as part of the Contemporânea collection by Livros do Brasil, translated by writer Bruno Vieira Amaral.
In ‘James’, Percival Everett reverses the focus of Mark Twain’s 1884 children’s novel by telling the story from the perspective of the enslaved person.
Similar to Twain’s original novel, ‘James’ recounts how Jim escapes slavery in Missouri, and Huckleberry Finn, known as Huck, fakes his death to flee his abusive and alcoholic father. Together, they float down the Mississippi River on a raft.
However, in Everett’s version, the narrative is taken over by the enslaved man who claims the power of authorship, beginning with the name James, which he chooses for himself and uses as the title of the novel.
Percival Everett, a 68-year-old American born on December 22, 1956, has published over thirty works and received numerous awards and honors.
His novel ‘The Trees’, also available in Portugal, was a finalist for the 2022 Booker Prize, and an earlier novel, ‘Erasure’, was adapted into the film ‘American Fiction’, which won the 2023 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In theater, the Pulitzer Prize went to ‘Purpose’, by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “a play about the complex dynamics and legacy of a wealthy African-American family whose patriarch was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement.” According to the jury, it is “a skillful blend of drama and comedy that explores how different generations define legacy.”
The Pulitzer Prize for History was awarded jointly to two books: ‘Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War’ by Edda L. Fields-Black, and ‘Native Nations: A Millennium in North America’ by Kathleen DuVal.
The former, according to the jury, is “a rich and revealing account of a slave rebellion that freed 756 people in a single day, intertwining military strategy and family history.”
The latter offers “a panoramic portrait of Native American nations and communities over a millennium, in a vivid and accessible account of their resilience, ingenuity, and triumph in the face of conflict and dispossession.”
The Pulitzer Prize for Biography was awarded to ‘Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life’ by Jason Roberts, “a dual and beautiful biography” of biologist Carl Linnaeus and naturalist and mathematician Georges-Louis de Buffon, who in the 18th century “dedicated their lives to identifying and describing the secrets of nature, and continue to influence how we understand the world.”
In Portugal, Jason Roberts has published ‘The Blind Traveler’ (Casa das Letras), a biography of James Holman (1786-1857), “a solitary and blind adventurer” who fought the slave trade in Africa, survived captivity in Siberia, hunted elephants in Ceylon, and helped map the Australian interior.
In the category of Memoir, the Pulitzer was awarded to ‘Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir’ by Tessa Hulls, “a moving work of literary art and discovery, whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother, and her grandmother – and the experience of trauma, passed through family stories.”
The Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded to ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement’ by Benjamin Nathans, “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissidence, examining how it was repeatedly suppressed yet continually reborn, populated by a vast cast of brave individuals dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-won rights.”
In Poetry, the prize recognized Marie Howe and her collection ‘New and Selected Poems’, “crafted from decades of work,” exploring everyday experiences in search of common signs of loneliness, mortality, and what is revealed as sacred in that process.
The Pulitzer Prize for Music was awarded to composer Susie Ibarra for ‘Sky Islands’, a work premiered last July in New York. This piece serves as a reminder of the destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity, inspired by the habitats of the Luzon tropical rainforest in the Philippines.
The Pulitzer Prizes are administered by Columbia University in New York, managing the fund bequeathed by Joseph Pulitzer, a notable American newspaper publisher, in the 1910s.
