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Loretta G. Woodard
Everett, Percival (1956– )
Born in Ft. Gordon, Georgia, Percival Everett grew
up in Columbia, South Carolina, and was educated
at the University of Miami, where he received a
bachelor’s degree in 1977, and Brown University,
where he earned a master’s degree in 1982. Everett
has held a variety of jobs, ranging from jazz mu-
sician to ranch worker; since 1985, he has held a
professorship in creative writing at various uni-
versities, including the University of Kentucky, the
University of Notre Dame, and the University of
California–Riverside. Currently, he directs the cre-
ative writing program at the University of South-
ern California. He and his wife divide their time
between a ranch east of Los Angeles and a home
on Vancouver Island.
A prolific writer of fiction, Everett has published
15 novels and short story collections. Suder (1983),
his first novel, concerns the central character’s at-
tempts to make sense of a lifetime of absurdity.
Traveling with his Charlie Parker record, a porta-
ble record player, a saxophone, an elephant named
Renoir, an overweight Chinese homosexual, and a
nine-year-old white girl named Jincy Jesse Jackson,
failing baseball player Craig Suder wanders around
the northwest trying to convince himself that he is
not crazy. Suder tries to rid himself of the memory
of his “crazy” mother, whose chief goal was to run
around the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, a
distance of 23 miles, if for no other reason than to
prove that she could. Suder later realizes that his
mother possessed strength of character, and he re-
solves to live by conquering his own fear of flying.
Cutting Lisa (1986) and Zulus (1989) continue
Everett’s focus on bizarre and often improbable
situations and outcomes. Cutting Lisa concerns the
performing of an abortion to preserve a bloodline,
while Zulus focuses on an overweight woman who
is the last one on earth capable of childbearing.
She becomes a highly prized commodity between
warring factions because of her fertility.
In For Her Dark Skin (1990), Everett goes in
another direction, retelling the myth of Jason
and Medea with Medea cast as a black woman,
and in God’s Country (1994) he makes another
foray into the western United States. Here he ex-
plores the dynamics between a racist white man,
Curt Marder, who must, by necessity, rely on the
services of Bubba, a black trapper and guide, to
find his wife, who has been kidnapped by whites
masquerading as Indians. In this novel, Everett
adds to the volatility of his examination of race
in America.
Two short story collections, The Weather and
the Women Treat Me Fair (1989) and Big Picture
(1996), present a number of complex characters
who find themselves in bizarre and sometimes
surreal circumstances, yet the best of the stories
affirm that Everett is a competent craftsman of
the short story. Later novels, including Watershed
(1996), Frenzy (1997), and Glyph extend Everett’s
fascination with eclectic ideas, ranging from the
modern-day dynamics between Native Americans
and the U.S. government to the black experience in
the West to the tenuous position of the genius in
society. In Frenzy, Everett returns to his fascination
with Greek mythology.
In Erasure (2001), Everett wades into the caul-
dron of gender and publishing politics, especially
as they affect the careers of black male writers of
serious literature. The main character, Thelonious
“Monk” Ellison, frustrated over years of being ig-
nored by major publishers for his serious rework-
ings of Greek myths, writes My Pafology, a novel
of the most vapid sort, the kind preferred by an
unimaginative reading public and a greedy press.
It is immediately hailed as an important work. The
fictional presentation is no doubt partly driven by
Everett’s own standing in the publishing world—
the author of a number of works, none of which
has been celebrated to the extent of other works of
arguably lesser quality.174 Everett, Percival