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Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in the slaveholding community of Hannibal, Mo., a town he would immortalize in “Huckleberry Finn” and its prequel, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

Everett’s inversion of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told by the eponymous James, allows its narrator to reclaim both his proper name and history from the character Twain simply called “Jim.”

I don’t want any more ‘Huckleberry Finn’ speeches.

Percival Everett has won the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s classic “Huckleberry Finn.”

Everett's James is a retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written from the perspective of the runaway slave, Jim.