Erasure

Erasure is a satirical, metafictional novel by American author Percival Everett, originally published in 2001. The novel tackles the complexities of language, racial identity, and the publishing industry, exploring how cultural expectations and the literary marketplace regulate African American literature and the Black experience. The novel won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in 2002. In 2023, Erasure was adapted into a film by Cord Jefferson with the title American Fiction.

Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has received multiple awards for his literary work, and he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2015, he won the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction and the Phi Kappa Phi Presidential Medallion from the University of Southern California. In 2023, he won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Los Angeles Review of Books UCR Lifetime Achievement Award.

This study guide uses the 2021 e-book edition by Faber & Faber.

Content Warning: The source text discusses racism, violence, sexual violence, anti-Black biases, anti-gay biases, and suicide. It also includes racist and sexist slurs that the guide reproduces only in direct quotations.

Plot Summary

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is an African American English professor and frustrated author whose newest work is repeatedly rejected by publishers who think it is not “Black enough.