Erasure Study Guide

Percival Everett was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his father was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina and attended college at the University of Miami, where he earned a bachelor’s in philosophy. He went on to attend Brown University, where he graduated with an M.A. in fiction in 1982. Suder, his first novel, was published in 1983. Over the course of his prolific career, Everett has published over 20 novels, four short story collections, and several books of poetry, among other works. His stories have been published in Best American Short Stories. His most recent novel, James, a reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the enslaved man Jim’s perspective, was published in 2024. Everett has received numerous literary awards for his work, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction (2015), the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dos Passos Prize. He was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2020 novel, Telephone. Everett lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna, and their children.

Erasure (and My Pafology, the novella Monk writes in Erasure) is a parody of so-called “Black” fiction, which in the novel describes stories that take place in an urban setting and portray the struggles of Black characters who display a number of exaggerated, offensive stereotypes often attributed to Black people living in poverty. This genre of writing is a subset of urban fiction, a literary genre that takes place in a city or urban area and focuses on the lives of characters who exist on the margins of society, highlighting the often bleak, violent reality of their experience in a frank, raw style. The origins of the genre trace back to the realist novels of 18th-century realist writers like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, who both wrote novels that depicted the harsh reality of urban living. The Harlem Renaissance movement of the 20th century continued this tradition, with writers like the poet Langston Hughes writing about the struggles of life in Harlem, New York City, from an African American perspective. Contemporary urban fiction is largely written by African American authors, a tradition that may be traced back to the Black Power movement of the 1970s, a social movement that emphasized racial pride among Black Americans and led to an embrace of Black art and culture. 

Erasure employs elements of parody and metafiction, with protagonist Monk representing, one could argue, a fictionalized version of the book’s author, Percival Everett—just as Monk, in Erasure, writes a fictionalized version of himself in the character Stagg R. Leigh. Everett frequently incorporates elements of metafiction into his works, many of which, like Erasure, examine themes of race, identity, and identity construction. Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier follows a protagonist named Not Sidney Poitier—who resembles the real-life actor Sidney Poitier—as he grapples with issues that stem from identity and race. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel, meanwhile, is about a man whose elderly father writes a novel from his son’s (i.e., the protagonist’s) perspective. Everett’s most recent novel, James, published in 2024, is a reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the enslaved man Jim’s perspective. My Pafology (later titled Fuck), which Monk writes in Erasure, is a parody of works written in heavy African American vernacular that (at least according to Monk) over-rely on exaggerated, negative stereotypes of African American people and Black suffering. Real books that Monk cites as examples of this so-called “ghetto fiction” include Native Son by Richard Wright, about a young Black man living in poverty in Chicago’s South Side; and Push by Sapphire, about an illiterate, pregnant Black teenager growing up in poverty in Harlem.