Percival Everett: “Reading Is the Most Subversive Thing You Can Do”
Acclaimed American novelist, poet, and short story writer Percival Everett was named an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Wesleyan’s 193rd Commencement ceremony. In his remarks, Everett denounced anti-intellectualism, telling the Class of 2025 that they “might well be the last line of defense of and for American intellectual life.”
The author of the best-selling novel James, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was short-listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, won the 2024 National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Fiction, Everett urged graduates to resist indoctrination by continuing to read and examine ideas. “There is a reason that fascists burn books. They are afraid of critical thinking,” he stated, also noting, “Reading is the most subversive thing you can do.”
Everett’s more than 30 books include The Trees (short-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize and winner of the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize) and Erasure (adapted into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction). Everett has received the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction and has won a Pulitzer Prize. Everett received a BA from the University of Miami and an MA in fiction writing from Brown University. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Everett made the following remarks during Wesleyan’s 193rd Commencement ceremony on May 25:
Congratulations. I would like to thank all of you for allowing me to be a part of this celebration. I'm not known for my love of parties, but this is pretty cool. I have long admired Wesleyan, and I am an admirer of President Roth. I offer special thanks to him for this opportunity and honor.
Art and history are always evolving. As in the sciences, the more we learn, the more our perception of knowledge and our world changes. People stand up on these occasions and talk about the hope that graduates like yourselves represent. You will hear that you are the promise for our culture, that you are our future. This is all true, cliché of course, but no less true for that fact. Given the state of our country, you are more than a mere promise. You might well be the last line of defense of and for American intellectual life. There are those among us who would not rewrite history, but erase it, who would not challenge science with science, but replace it with fear and opinion, who would not champion charity and generosity for any reason except profit and/or public perception. These are not our enemies, and we should not give them power by seeing them as such. They are a disease in our world, one that will be cured by education and by intellectual standards taught and maintained in places such as this.
I was lucky to grow up with a grandfather and a father who were doctors who read novels, who listened to music, who enjoyed paintings. I learned from them that truth resides in the art that a culture makes. If you want to understand a culture, you look at the art it produces. To understand the art, you don't look at the artists, you look at the audience. It is the audience, the readers, listeners, viewers who make all the meaning to be found in art. And art is more expansive in definition than one might think. Science is art. Mathematics is art. None of these practices grow and change without the same creativity that creates symphonies and jazz and sculpture and novels.
We are faced with forces that would limit our educations, that would curtail our ability to discuss and examine and dismantle ideas without fear. These forces are opposed to intellectual pursuits, opposed to challenges to the status quo. They would monetize everything if they could. They are afraid of you, all of you. There is a reason that fascists burn books. They are afraid of critical thinking. They are afraid of thought. What you have learned here at Wesleyan is how to read. That is no small thing. Your reading is not confined to the page. You have learned to read the world, people, actions, conspiracies. You have learned to think for yourselves.
Reading is the most subversive thing you can do. When you read, no one knows what's going into you, even if they are reading over your shoulder, and they are. The second most subversive thing is not writing; that's a distant third. The second is belonging to a book club or being in a classroom. None of you have ever been indoctrinated by a good teacher. You have learned to resist indoctrination, you have learned to be critical and properly skeptical. This life of the mind that has been opened to you will make your life richer, will allow you to grow, and, my hope, will allow you to challenge the anti-intellectual elements that have taken root and attempt to use fear to silence those who think. I ask nothing more from you than to do what you have been doing. Go out into the fray and keep reading.
