James Alan McPherson
James Alan McPherson was a prominent American writer known for his impactful short fiction, particularly in the context of the Civil Rights era. Born on September 16, 1943, in Savannah, Georgia, he grew up in a racially segregated but culturally rich environment. McPherson graduated from Morris Brown College and later earned his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he also began to establish his writing career. His first collection of short stories, *Hue and Cry*, published in 1969, portrayed characters grappling with loneliness and societal challenges, marking his entry into the literary scene.
McPherson gained wider recognition with his second collection, *Elbow Room*, released in 1977, which won the Pulitzer Prize and showcased a more optimistic outlook on race relations and personal identity. Throughout his career, he sought to capture the complexities of American life, often challenging racial and cultural stereotypes, and emphasizing individual rather than group identity. In addition to fiction, McPherson wrote essays and memoirs, including *Crabcakes* and *A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile*, reflecting on his personal experiences and the broader American landscape. He served as a professor at the University of Iowa until his retirement in 2014 and passed away on July 27, 2016. McPherson's legacy endures through his contributions to literature that resonate with themes of dignity, identity, and the human experience.
James Alan McPherson
Author
- Born: September 16, 1943
- Birthplace: Savannah, Georgia
American short-story writer and essayist
Identity: African American
Biography
James Alan McPherson was one of the most accomplished American writers of short fiction to have achieved prominence in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, on September 16, 1943, the son of James Allen and Mable (Smalls) McPherson. His father was an electrician; his mother, a domestic in a white household. Although the Savannah of McPherson’s childhood and youth remained segregated, it was a multicultural city that encouraged him, he had said, to develop a conception of human identity that transcended racial categories.
McPherson earned a BA from Morris Brown College in 1965. Upon graduating, he was recruited by Harvard Law School, where he received his LLB degree in 1968. While at Harvard, he sold his first two short stories to The Atlantic; the first to be published, “Gold Coast,” was honored as the best work of fiction to appear in that magazine in 1968. On the strength of that story and other manuscripts soon to be published in his first book, The Atlantic awarded McPherson a creative writing grant in 1969. That same year he began a long-term relationship with the journal as a contributing editor, and he also completed the MFA program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Hue and Cry, McPherson’s first collection of short fiction, also appeared in 1969. The volume contains ten stories, many of them rather grim in tone and most of them written during the summer of 1968. The characters McPherson portrayed were often lonely, isolated, confused, even defeated—the victims of both social forces and personal failings. Building upon his own work experiences as a grocery clerk, dining-car waiter, janitor, and law student, McPherson created stories of a stark, compelling realism. The haunting refrain of the title story—“But if this is all there is, what is left of life and why are we alive?”—sounded one of the volume’s principal notes. As the book’s title and epigraph suggest, Hue and Cry was an implicit protest against the conditions it detailed. McPherson’s compassion for his characters, and their own courage and skill amid adversity, evoked sympathy from the reader, a recognition that life should be different.
The widespread praise accorded Hue and Cry was surpassed by the even greater critical success of McPherson’s second collection of stories, Elbow Room. Published in 1977, the volume won for McPherson the Pulitzer Prize the following year. In these twelve stories McPherson revealed a refreshing sense of humor grounded in folkloric traditions and a far greater optimism about the future of race relations in the United States and about the fulfillment of individual quests for identity. A comparison of the title stories from these two books, both of them treatments of interracial love affairs, demonstrates the marked shift in mood between the two volumes. In “Hue and Cry” the interracial relationships disintegrate, whereas in “Elbow Room” the young couple not only marry each other but also produce a child who represents the possibility of a new order in American society. Considered as a group, the stories in Elbow Room are also better crafted and more varied than those in Hue and Cry. McPherson’s subsequent receipt of a MacArthur Foundation Award in 1981 confirmed his position as an important American writer, though one who published infrequently.
Like his friend and mentor Ralph Ellison, whom he did not meet until 1970, after the publication of Hue and Cry, McPherson sought to embrace in his fiction the diversity and complexity of American life, with its tensions and contradictions (not the life of any one race, class, or ethnic group). His stories subvert a range of stereotypes—racial, sexual, political, and cultural—thus insisting on the primacy of individual, not group, identity. At the same time, McPherson depicted characters who embody universal qualities; they are representative Americans, such as the black narrator of “Why I Like Country Music,” the initial story in Elbow Room. His fiction is often at its best when it makes use of the speaking voice, permitting its characters to reveal themselves, or the stories’ protagonists, through first-person narratives, as in “A Solo Song: For Doc,” “Gold Coast,” and “The Story of a Dead Man.” Some of his most interesting stories result from the tension he establishes between the narrator’s voice and that of another central character.
While McPherson cannot be classified as a writer of social protest literature, he was keenly aware of the need for change. McPherson also recorded the painful personal losses that can accompany rapid social change. In “A Solo Song: For Doc” Doc Craft’s forced retirement from his career as a dining-car waiter becomes emblematic, for McPherson, of the decay not only of the American railroad but also of the cultural and political principles the railroad had long embodied. As Railroad, an anthology of miscellaneous works, makes clear, the railroad in McPherson’s stories symbolizes a freedom of movement and a potential for self-transformation that McPherson believed to be fundamental to a genuinely democratic society.
Since 1981, when he began teaching at the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, McPherson’s published writing turned to essays rather than short stories. These nonfictional works are marked, nonetheless, by the same concerns and literary style that is found in his fiction. He won the Best American Essay award in 1990 and 1993–5 and the Pushcart Prize in 1995. Refusing to subscribe to the separatist aesthetic of the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s, McPherson nevertheless remained a writer deeply rooted in the black American experience. Acknowledging both the need for and the difficulties of achieving self-definition in American society, his fiction speaks powerfully and compassionately of people, both black and white, who strive to affirm human dignity and a shared American identity.
McPherson was awarded membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1998, he published a memoir entitled Crabcakes. Two years later, he published a collection of personal essays. The collection, called A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, examined his life through the different towns where he had lived. he is a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa.
Though McPherson did not publish anymore work, he remained a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa until his retirement in 2014. He passed away on July 27, 2016, at the age of seventy-two, following complications related to pneumonia. He is survived by two children, Rachel and Benjamin.
His Legacy
Even though McPherson did not publish a large quantity of writing, the works that he did compose have remained poignant representations of the African American experience. His work has been consistently praised by critics and readers alike, even as time has passed, for its depth of characters and honest portrayal of race relations.
Bibliography
Beavers, Herman. “I Yam What You Is and You Is What I Yam: Rhetorical Invisibility in James Alan McPherson’s ‘The Story of a Dead Man.’” Callaloo 9 (1986): 565–77. Print.
Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995. Print.
Cox, Joseph T. “James Alan McPherson.” Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South. Ed. Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. Print.
"James Alan McPherson: Contributor Profile." Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, 1996. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
Laughlin, Rosemary M. “Attention, American Folklore: Doc Craft Comes Marching In.” Studies in American Fiction 1 (1973): 221–27. Print.
“McPherson, James Alan.” Current Biography 57 (1996): 34–38. Print.
McPherson, James Alan. “Interview with James Alan McPherson.” Interview by Bob Shacochis. Iowa Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1983): 6–33. Print.
Reid, Calvin. “James Alan McPherson: A Theater of Memory.” Publishers Weekly 15 Dec. 1997: 36–37. Print.
Roberts, Sam. "James Alan McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer, Dies at 72." New York Times. New York Times, 27 July 2016. 1 Sept. 2016.
Wallace, Jon. The Politics of Style: Language as Theme in the Fiction of Berger, McGuane, and McPherson. Durango: Hollowbrook, 1992. Print.
Wallace, Jon. “The Politics of Style in Three Stories by James Alan McPherson.” Modern Fiction Studies 34 (1988): 17–26. Print.
Wallace, Jon. “The Story Behind the Story in James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room.” Studies in Short Fiction 25 (1988): 447–52. Print.