Bestselling author, Oregon Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Tracy Daugherty of Corvallis will review the bestselling and multiple award-winning James by Percival Everett as part of the library’s Random Review series this month.
Set for noon, on Wednesday, April 8, this program will take place in the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library’s main meeting room, or you can attend online by clicking here.
About the Book
Percival Everett’s James is one of the defining books of the times, a retelling of Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the escaped enslaved man Huck knows as “[N-word] Jim.” It was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2025 Pulitzer for Fiction and the National Book Award, and won or was nominated for numerous other honors in the U.S. and abroad.
About Daugherty
Tracy Daugherty and his wife, the writer and musician Marjorie Sandor, helped to found the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University, where he is now distinguished professor emeritus. He is the author of over 25 books, one of which, Larry McMurtry: A Life, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other works include biographies of
Donald Barthelme, Joseph Heller, and The Last Love Song: A Life of Joan Didion, which was a New York Times bestseller. He has written a biography of Cormac McCarthy that will be forthcoming in October 2026. In 2007 Tracy reviewed My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud for Random Review.
About Random Review
Random Review is a deep exploration of a selected book by a reviewer with expertise on the topic or theme of that book. Sometimes reviewers cover a classic, series, genre, or author, but usually they cover a specific title.
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