Perhaps it’s no surprise that a great writer thinks deeply about words themselves. After all, words are Percival Everett’s craft.

“Language is power,” Mr. Everett said in a recent interview outside the Black Dog Cafe. “It’s how we think.” 

After four decades of writing, Mr. Everett continues to mine language for humor, drama and reflection. It is the way each of us, he says, discovers and creates meaning in our everyday life. After all, the “whole idea” of language, Mr. Everett said, is “the construction of meaning.” 

“The actual words themselves mean nothing. The meaning is all in the construction,” Mr. Everett said. 

For nearly two decades, Mr. Everett has spent time on the Vineyard each summer with his family. Freed from the responsibilities of teaching, he spends the long cool evenings at his computer, writing. 

On Sunday, July 21 he takes a break from his vacation to speak at the Performing Arts Center as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series, where he will be in discussion with Barbara Phillips, former associate professor of law at University of Mississippi School of Law and a civil rights litigator. The event begins at 7 p.m. 

Mr. Everett is the distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California. During his career he has published over a dozen novels, as well as multiple collections of short fiction and poetry.

His 2001 novel Erasure, about a Black author whose satire of “Black” fiction finds unironic success, was adapted into the movie American Fiction, which was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning for best adapted screenplay. 

His most recent book, the national bestseller James, reimagines the events of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, an escaped slave and Huck’s travel companion.

In Mr. Everett’s writing Jim’s “superstitious, childlike” behavior is reimagined as a performance that Jim and other slaves put on to mollify white expectations.

“Jim is not rendered fully in Twain’s novel,” Mr. Everett said. “Twain wasn’t trying to tell his story. And he was... ill-equipped to tell Jim’s story. So I decided I would tell it from Jim’s point of view, and allow his agency to come through.”

“I had to divorce myself from Twain and his language,” Mr. Everett continued. “I wanted to inhabit the world of Huck Finn, but not the text.”

Jim’s careful use of two languages — how he speaks to Huck, on one hand, and how he narrates the story and converses with other enslaved people, on the other — gives Mr. Everett room to explore how a man produces or loses his agency through the language he speaks.

The reader’s understanding that Jim’s slow and superstitious character is a ruse also gives Mr. Everett a chance to refashion one of Mark Twain’s favorite themes, irony, for his own use.

“It’s hard to be an American without having a developed sense of irony,” Mr. Everett said. 

American life is full of ironies, Mr. Everett continued, including the fact that a love of “liberty and independence” has long dovetailed with a history of oppression and racial subjugation. 

In his book, Mr. Everett needles these contradictions. In a memorable moment, Jim, secretly literate, exposes the “labyrinthine and Daedalean” hoops that the liberal philosopher John Locke went through to justify slavery. It was Locke who gave Jefferson the phrase: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The ruling irony of James is that the white characters, believing their slaves stupid, become the stupid ones themselves. Constantly hoodwinked, their own sense of superiority debases them. 

Mr. Everett’s fascination with language and irony began when, as a student, he studied mathematical logic and the philosophy of language — analytical fields where obscure symbols can be as common as words. Over time, he shifted to the world of fiction. During his career he has published over a dozen novels, as well as multiple collections of short fiction and poetry. Like James, many resemble dense, novel-length jokes. 

To this day, Mr. Everett said he spends a lot of time reading “philosophy and math.” 

“A lot of it I don’t understand and that makes it even more exciting to me,” he said.

After all, inspiration can come from anywhere, he said.

With James a national bestseller and American Fiction an Oscar winner, Mr. Everett said he’s received more attention than ever before. 

“I get to be recognized. I suppose it’s nice, but I’d rather not be.”

He comes to the Vineyard, he said, to play tennis, walk in the woods and spend time in the quiet. 

“I just like being alone,” he said. “The Island is a comfortable place to be. If I’m not comfortable I can’t write.”