This reissue of National Book Award–winning author Percival Everett and James Kincaid’s classic political satire lampoons conservative hysteria for a new generation.

“[A]n outrageously funny satire of race relations and racism, US history, contemporary sexual mores and behavior, academia, and the publishing industry . . . It could become a cult-classic . . . Highly recommended.”—Library Journal

“The story’s epistolary format allows novelist Everett and literary theorist Kincaid to write in a chorus of richly individuated voices, by turns—and often simultaneously—sardonic, hysterical, obsequious, and threatening, aware of their own hypocrisies but unwilling to renounce them. The result is a truly funny send-up of the corrupt politics of academe, the publishing industry, and politics, as well as a subtle but biting critique of racial ideology.” —Publishers Weekly

National Book Award winner Everett and Kincaid present a fictitious chronicle of the late South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s desire to pen a history of African Americans—his and his aides’ belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, A History of the African-American People (Proposed) follows the letters of loose-cannon congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house, and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, kindly family friends, and an aspiring author named Septic. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history. 

About the Authors: PERCIVAL EVERETT is is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent books include James (#1 New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, Kirkus Prize winner), Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), and Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.

James Kincaid is an English professor masquerading as an author (or the other way around). He’s published two novels, a couple dozen short stories, and ever so many nonfiction articles, reviews, and books, including long studies of Dickens, Trollope, and Tennyson, along with two books on Victorian and modern eroticizing of children.