John Burt

Percival Everett’s James (2024) is a creative response to Huckleberry Finn (1885). It is not

a parody or a “talking back” to another book, as Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001)

is to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) (or as Larry Brenner’s brief 1990 “A

Letter to ‘De Ole True Huck’” is to Huckleberry Finn). Everett transforms the novel, paying

attention to the features of it that have drawn the most criticism over the last generation,

but at the same time his novel seeks to preserve what he takes to be Twain’s deepest values,

seeking to repair the book’s failings while remaining true to its meaning as he understands

it.