We celebrate South Carolina’s Percival Everett, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel James.
The point of view in James is that of Huckleberry Finn’s comrade, Jim, rather than Huck, bringing Mark Twain’s 1884 masterpiece back to life.
Did you know South Carolina has another author who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1929? Julia Mood Peterkin won for her novel, Scarlet Sister Mary, about the lives of black characters who worked Lang’s Syne plantation in Fort Motte, Calhoun County, in the 1920s.
W.E.B. Dubois declared, “She wrote with truth and beauty” about the dangerous and difficult lives people led on the property. Her exquisite portrayal of nature remains fresh and exciting to this day.
Peterkin was born on October 31, 1880 in Laurens County. She earned a masters in comparative religion from Converse College, took a teaching job in Fort Motte, and married the heir to Langs Syne, Willie Peterkin, in Sumter. They are buried nearby in St. Matthews Anglican Parish churchyard.
Before she started to write at age 41, Peterkin had the lead in a sell-out play in Columbia Town Theater. Peterkin started to write when her piano professor at Chicora College told her she had a gift for storytelling. She took summer writing classes at Winthrop College.
When she heard that Carl Sandburg had spoken in Charleston and Columbia, she invited him to Langs Syne to review her work. He came, then introduced her to literary critic H.L. Menken. She continued to publish novels, and Scarlet Sister Mary became a Broadway play. Peterkin kept company with the likes of Katherine Hepburn, Aaron Copeland, Ethel Barrymore, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Langston Hughes. She died in 1961.
Let us celebrate both South Carolina Pulitzer Prize winners, Percival Everett and Julia Mood Peterkin.
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