Go Big Read conversation centers around literature and language as a radical act

At nine, Percival Everett secretly read Of Human Bondage - a moment that sparked his belief that reading is a radical act.

"I thought, 'I shouldn't be reading this.' But my grandfather, and my father, knew," he said, smiling. "And they let me have this game all to myself."

Everett recalled sneaking into libraries as a teen and praised librarians who "indulged this kid" and often let him in.

They deserve special status, according to Everett. "At airports, I think boarding before me should be grade school, middle school and high school teachers and librarians," he said.

The parallels between young Everett and James, the title character of his newest novel, which also won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, highlight Everett's belief in the importance of literacy and language. James reimagines the story of Jim, the runaway slave from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, placing him at the center of the story and giving him a voice of his own.

On Tuesday night, in conversation with UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin, Everett, a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, discussed these themes and more at the Go Big Read keynote at Union South, attended by the campus and wider community.

Chancellor Mnookin noted that she read the book as a "law school evidence professor" and noticed the motifs of reading and writing that appeared in the story - from access to libraries to a character being killed for stealing a pencil. Everett agreed these were intentional.

"If you control the language, you control everything," he said. "That's why literacy is so important. James has learned to read, and these texts produce for him a free space in his mind, even as he's an enslaved person."

Mnookin also asked him about the enslaved individuals' use of "correct incorrect" dialects around the novel's white characters. Everett said the striking fact isn't whether they used standard English, but that even in the 1930s, WPA workers altered recordings of formerly enslaved people into fabricated "slave dialects."

"Either the racism was so deeply ingrained that no matter how these people sounded, that's what [the workers] were going to hear," Everett said, or "they were instructed to do this, which is conscious and pernicious."

He said he made the choice to have the enslaved individuals in the book use standard English "not because it represents reality, but because people who are enslaved and oppressed find private ways to talk. Who knows how they sounded talking to one another? But they would have been able to talk about complex and complicated issues because they are human."

That choice extends to his relationship with readers, and his hope that reading - and literature - remain central to how we engage with the world and one another.

"I may write the book, but it's nothing until the reader comes to it," he said. "When you read the book, meaning is generated… And even when you re-read it, you're a different person next week from the person you are now."

That ongoing dialogue, he said, gives art its staying power, but he'd love to "live in a culture where we prize literature as much as we prize television or movies. A lot of times we'll read books, and we give them to somebody else," he said, stating that we don't do the same with art or music. "We live with it. That's how I'd like us to change - the way we live with literature."

Everett closed by bringing things full circle to where he started the evening.

"Reading is the single most subversive act there is," he said. "There's a reason that fascists burn books. They're afraid of you reading. When you open a book, no one can see what it's doing to you."

He said the second most subversive thing is not to write, but to belong to a book club, because you're "becoming collectively smarter."

"I don't care if you agree with me about anything," Evertt said. "I want to live in a world where people think - where they don't react to the world out of fear and out of having been told to think a certain way. That's so powerful. And that's at the heart of reading and critical thinking and education."

Mnookin thanked Everett and all those who "believe books matter" for coming out to participate in Go Big Read, an initiative of the Office of the Chancellor that engages the UW-Madison community and the public in a shared, academically-focused reading experience each year.

She closed by asking him, in this time of public divisiveness and attacks on education, "Is there hope?"

"I write literary fiction thinking I'm going to make a living," Everett joked, eliciting laughter from the crowd. "Seriously, though - I have kids, so I have to have hope. But I'm a certain kind of optimist. If I get in the car and it has half a tank of gas, I don't say, it's half empty; we're never going to get there. I say, it's half full."

"And I think we'll make it," he said.