Pulitzer Prize watchers might have expected Percival Everett's James to take top honors, considering the Huckleberry Finn reimagining had already nabbed the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize and was a Booker Prize finalist. But as the New York Times reports via three unnamed sources, it wasn't a straightforward path to choosing James as this year's fiction winner. Those sources say James wasn't among the three finalists the jury had selected for consideration: Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot, Stacey Levine's Mice 1961, and Gayl Jones' The Unicorn Woman. But when the 17 members voted, none of those three ended up with a majority of votes.
So the board used a procedural option to expand the finalist pool—a step laid out in Pulitzer rules: "If the Board is dissatisfied with the nominations of any jury, it can ask the Administrator to consult with the chair to ascertain if there are other worthy entries." The board made the request, and James was offered as a fourth option. It got the votes.
This process isn't unprecedented. In 2015, a fourth finalist was similarly added (Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See won that year), and Lit Hub points out there were similarly four entries in the drama category in 2010. The other option would've been to withhold the award entirely, as happened in 2012. At Lit Hub, Drew Broussard shares his take: "No matter how you slice it, this says to me [that] the 2025 fiction jury turned in what would have been a world-shaking all-woman trio of finalists in a year when one novel by a male writer has taken up quite a lot of the available oxygen, and the Board—one way or another—said 'No.'" (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)
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