Everett lives in Los Angeles, California.
Career
While completing his MFA degree at Brown University, Everett wrote his first novel,
Suder (1983), about Craig Suder, a Seattle Mariners third baseman in major league slump, both on and off the field. Everett's second novel,
Walk Me to the Distance (1985), was later re-interpreted with an altered plot as an ABC TV movie entitled
Follow Your Heart. In this novel, David Larson returns from Vietnam and attempts to find the retarded son of a one-legged sheep rancher in Slut's Whole, Wyoming.
Cutting Lisa (1986; re-issued 2000) begins with John Livesey meeting a man who has performed a caesarean section that prompts the protagonist to evaluate his relationships.
In 1987, Everett published
The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories, a collection of short stories. Everett published two books re-fashioning Greek myths in 1990:
Zulus, which combines the grotesque and the apocalypse, and
For Her Dark Skin, a new version of the Greek playwright Euripedes' Medea.
Stepping into the children's book marketplace, Everett authored
The One That Got Away (1992), an illustrated book for young readers that follows three cowboys as they attempt to corral "ones," the mischievous numerals.
Returning to novels, Everett published his first book-length western,
God's Country, in 1994. In the novel, Curt Marder and his tracker Bubba search "God's country" for a wife Marder might not even want to find, but who has been kidnapped by bandits. A parody of westerns and the politics of race and gender, which includes a cross-dressing George Armstrong Custer). 1996 brought two more books from Everett.
Watershed is another of Everett's books with a western setting, this time contemporary, focusing on loner hydrologist Robert Hawkes, who meets a Native American small person who helps him come to terms with the inter-relation of people. Also published in 1996 was a second collection of stories,
Big Picture.
In
Frenzy (1997), Everett returns to Greek mythology where Dionysos' assistant, Vlepo, is forced to experience a "frenzy" of odd activities, including becoming lice and bedroom curtains at different times during the story, which he narrates, all so he can explain what the experiences are like to Dionysos, the half-god.
Glyph (1999) is the story within a story of Ralph, a baby who chooses not to speak but has extraordinary muscle-control and an IQ nearing 500, which he uses to write notes to his mother on a variety of literary topics based on books she supplies. Ralph is kidnapped a variety of times due to his special skills, and his odyssey (as "written" by four year old Ralph) teaches him more about love than intellect.
Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001) is Everett's first novella. In it, Rhino Tanner attempts to tame Mother Nature with a commercialization of the Grand Canyon.
Everett also published the novel
Erasure in 2001. In a reflection of Everett's own experience, the book targets what Everett views as the publishing industry's pigeon-holing of African American writers. The protagonist, Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a professor of English literature is repeatedly criticized for not writing "black enough". Ellison is angered by the success of an Oprah-like book club's selection of what is supposedly contemporary black experience, but which in fact presents a stereotypical image. He composes a satirical response based on Richard Wright's
Native Son and Sapphire's novel
Push, which is entitled first
My Pafology and then
Fuck. The Oprah-like talk show host, a Hollywood producer and a panel of famous novelists all prove more willing to accept the brutal, dehumanized black man of the novel than a middle-class intellectual like Ellison himself, who in turn has trouble facing impoverished blacks both real and fictional.
A History of the African-American people (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (2004), an epistolary novel, chronicles "Percival Everett" and "James Kincaid" as they work with Thurmond (occasionally) and his aide's crazy assistant, Barton Wilkes, who orders the authors around even while he stalks them.
Also in 2004, Everett released
American Desert and
Damned If I Do : Stories, another collection of short stories. In
American Desert, Ted Street plans to drown himself in the ocean but is killed in a traffic accident on the way there. Three days later, Street suddenly sits up in his casket at the funeral, his head still severed and without a beating heart. Throughout the rest of the novel, Street undergoes an odyssey of self-discovery about what being alive really means, exploring religion, revelation, faith, zealotry, love, family, media sensationalism, and death.
Wounded: a novel (2005) tells the story of John Hunt, a horse trainer confronted with hate crimes against a homosexual and a Native American. Unlike Robert Hawkes, however, John Hunt avoids getting mixed up in the political nature of these crimes, taking action only when he is forced to do so.
The Water Cure (2007) is Everett's novel about Ishmael Kidder, who has had a successful career as a romance novelist until the death of his daughter, when his life takes a dark turn. In a remote cabin in New Mexico, Kidder has imprisoned a man he believes to be his daughter's killer. The book's title refers to one of the torture techniques Kidder uses on the man, namely waterboarding.
In 2009, Graywolf Press released
I Am Not Sidney Poitier. With the name Not Sidney Poitier and a resemblance to the actor with a similar name, the protagonist meets challenges relating to identity and racial segregation across North America. Furthermore, he meets similar challenges with identity construction in relation to his adopted father, Ted Turner.
Poetry
Everett's collection of poetry,
re:f (gesture) (2006), features one of his paintings on the front cover. His latest poetry book,
Swimming Swimmers Swimming, was published in 2010 by Melville House Publishing.
Other
Everett's introduction was added to the 2004 paperback edition of
The Jefferson Bible.
Honors
- PEN Center USA Award for Fiction
- Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction
- New American Writing Award
- PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
- His stories have been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories
- Received an honorary Doctorate in 2008 from the College of Santa Fe.
- Winner of the 2010 Believer Book Award for I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
