McPherson, James Alan 1943–

PERSONAL: Born September 16, 1943, in Savannah, GA; son of James Allen and Mable (Smalls) McPherson. Education: Attended Morgan State University, 1963–64; Morris Brown College, B.A., 1965; Harvard University, LL.B., 1968; University of Iowa, M.F. A., 1969.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242.

CAREER: University of Iowa, Iowa City, instructor in writing at Law School, 1968–69, instructor in Afro-American literature, 1969; University of California, Santa Cruz, faculty member, 1969–70; Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, faculty member, 1975–76; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, faculty member, 1976–81; University of Iowa, Writers Workshop, Iowa City, professor, 1981–; Double Take magazine, editor, 1995–; Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, behavioral studies fellow, 1997–.

MEMBER: Authors League of America, PEN, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, American Civil Liberties Union.

AWARDS, HONORS: First prize, Atlantic short story contest, 1965, for "Gold Coast"; grant from Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, 1969; National Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, 1970; Guggenheim fellow, 1972–73; Pulitzer Prize, 1978, for Elbow Room: Stories; MacArthur fellowship, 1981; Excellence in Technology award, University of Iowa, 1991; Best American Essays, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995; Pushcart Prize, 1995.

WRITINGS:

Hue and Cry: Short Stories, Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1969, reprinted, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Miller Williams) Railroad: Trains and Train People in American Culture, Random House (New York, NY), 1976.

Elbow Room: Stories, Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1977.

(Author of foreword) Breece D'J Pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, Atlantic-Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1983, reprinted, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2002.

Crabcakes: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with DeWitt Henry) Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1998.

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.

Work has been anthologized in books, including Cutting Edges, edited by J. Hicks, Holt (New York, NY), 1973; Black Insights: Significant Literature by Afro-Americans, 1760 to the Present, edited by Nick A. Ford, Wiley (New York, NY), 1976; Book for Boston, edited by Llewellyn Howland and Isabelle Storey, David Godine (Boston, MA), 1980; Speaking for You, edited by Kimberly W. Benson, Howard University Press, 1987; A World Unsuspected, edited by Alex Harris, Hill, NC], 1987; and New Black Voices, New American Library. Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic, Esquire, New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Reader's Digest, and Callaloo. Contributing editor, Atlantic, beginning 1969; editor of special issue, Iowa Review, winter, 1984.

SIDELIGHTS: James Alan McPherson's stories of ordinary, working-class people, though often concerning African-American characters, are noted for their ability to confront universal human problems. "His standpoint," Robie Macauley explained in the New York Times Book Review, "[is] that of a writer and a black, but not that of a black writer. [McPherson] refused to let his fiction fall into any color-code or ethnic code." Because of this stance, McPherson's characters are more fully rounded than are those of more racially conscious writers. As Paul Bailey wrote in the Observer Review and quoted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, "The Negroes and whites [McPherson] describes always remain individual people—he never allows himself the luxury of turning them into Problems." Explaining his approach to the characters in his stories, McPherson was quoted by Patsy B. Perry of the Dictionary of Literary Biography as saying: "Certain of these people [my characters] happen to be black, and certain of them happen to be white; but I have tried to keep the color part of most of them far in the background, where these things should rightly be kept." McPherson has published two collections of short stories, Hue and Cry: Short Stories and Elbow Room: Stories. In 1978 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

McPherson was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, a city in which several cultures—including the French, Spanish, and Indian—have been uniquely blended. He cites this rich cultural heritage as a determining factor in his own ability to transcend racial barriers. The McPherson family also influenced his development of values. The author's father, at one time the only licensed black master electrician in Georgia, and his mother, a domestic in a white household, had important contacts in both the white and black communities. Through their efforts, McPherson obtained work as a grocery boy in a local supermarket and as a waiter on a train. These experiences formed the basis for several later stories. McPherson's train employment also allowed him to travel across the country. Perry noted that McPherson "affirms the importance of both white and black communities in his development as an individual and as a writer of humanistic ideas."

McPherson's writing career began in the 1960s while he was still attending law school. His story "Gold Coast" won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Atlantic magazine, which has gone on to play a pivotal role in McPherson's career. After earning a bachelor's degree, a law degree, and a master's degree in creative writing, McPherson became a contributing editor of the Atlantic in 1969. And the magazine, in conjunction with Little, Brown, also published his two collections of short stories.

McPherson's first collection, Hue and Cry, deals with characters whose lives are so desperate that they can only rage impotently against their situations. "The fact that these characters …," wrote Perry, "know nothing else to do except to sink slowly into madness, scream unintelligibly, or seek refuge … provides reason enough for McPherson's hue and cry." A Times Literary Supplement critic pointed to the book's "mostly desperate, mostly black, mostly lost figures in the urban nightmare of violence, rage and bewilderment that is currently America."

Despite the grim nature of his stories, McPherson manages to depict the lives of his characters with sympathy and grace. Bailey allows that McPherson's "powers of observation and character-drawing are remarkable, displaying a mature novelist's understanding of the vagaries and inconsistencies of human affairs." Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe maintained that McPherson "possesses an ability some writers take decades to acquire, the ability to keep the right distance from the creatures of his imagination, not to get murkily involved and blot out his figures with vanity and fuss." Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review noted that McPherson "is acutely aware of the misery and injustice in the world, and he sympathizes deeply with the victims whether they are black or white."

Elbow Room, McPherson's second collection, won even more critical praise than its predecessor. Again concerned with characters in desperate situations, the stories of Elbow Room are nonetheless more optimistic than McPherson's earlier works, the characters more willing to struggle for some measure of success. They "engage in life's battles with integrity of mind and spirit," as Perry explains. This optimism is noted by several critics. Robert Phillips, reviewing the book for Commonweal, found the stories in Elbow Room to be "difficult struggles for survival, yet [McPherson's] sense of humor allows him to dwell on moments which otherwise might prove unbearable." Writing in Newsweek, Margo Jefferson called McPherson "an astute realist who knows how to turn the conflicts between individual personalities and the surrounding culture into artful and highly serious comedies of manners."

McPherson's ability to create believable characters, and his focus on the underlying humanity of all his characters, has been praised by such critics as Phillips. McPherson's stories, Phillips maintained, "ultimately become not so much about the black condition as the human condition…. Elbow Room is a book of singular achievement." Macauley explained that McPherson has been able "to look beneath skin color and cliches of attitude into the hearts of his characters…. This is a fairly rare ability in American fiction." A New Yorker reviewer listed several other characteristics of McPherson's stories that are worthy of attention, calling him "one of those rare writers who can tell a story, describe shadings of character, and make sociological observations with equal subtlety."

McPherson broke a silence of nearly twenty years in 1998 with publication of Crabcakes: A Memoir, "a profoundly personal tale of displacement and discovery that is poetic and universal," according to a writer for Kirkus Reviews. Roy Hoffman in the New York Times Book Review reported that the book, "part lilting memoir, part anxious meditation," deals elliptically with McPherson's long struggle with writer's block, his trav-els in Japan, and his slow recovery of a sense of connection with his past and present. Hoffman faulted the author for being "far more elusive than the protagonists in his short fiction…. When McPherson writes fiction, he insists that his characters reveal whether they've been abandoned by a lover, frozen out by a child. Why should he, as a memoirist, reveal far less?" Conversely, a reviewer for Black Studies deemed the book "richly rewarding," and a Publishers Weekly reviewer dubbed Crabcakes an "intense mosaic" that "combines James Baldwin's moral compulsion to testify and Ishmael Reed's iconoclastic experimentalism."

McPherson followed up Crabcakes with A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, another collection of personal and cultural essays. Booklist reviewer Mary Carroll wrote that in this work "McPherson offers flashes of unexpected insight; his path often twists and turns, but his side trips are well worth the time and effort." In Publishers Weekly a reviewer added of A Region Not Home that, "Throughout, there's an easy kitchentable quality to McPherson's style that invites the reader … these are essays on how to live."

Speaking of the obstacles and opportunities facing black writers in the late twentieth century, McPherson once wrote in the Atlantic: "It seems to me much of our writing has been, and continues to be, sociological because black writers have been concerned with protesting black humanity and racial injustice to the larger society in those terms most easily understood by nonblack people. It also seems to me that we can correct this limitation either by defining and affirming the values and cultural institutions of our people for their education or by employing our own sense of reality and our own conception of what human life should be to explore, and perhaps help define, the cultural realities of contemporary American life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Beavers, Herman, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Faines and James Alan McPherson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 19, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Wallace, Jon, The Politics of Style: Language As Theme in the Fiction of Berger, McGuane, and McPherson, Hollowbrook, 1992.

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, winter, 1978.

Atlantic, December, 1970; February, 1977, review of Elbow Room: Stories.

Black Studies, February 1, 1998.

Booklist, June 1, 1998, review of Crabcakes: A Memoir, p. 1682; February 15, 2000, Mary Carroll, review of A Region Not Home, p. 1073.

Chicago Tribune Book World, May 25, 1969, review of Hue and Cry.

Christian Science Monitor, July 31, 1969, review of Hue and Cry.

CLA Journal, June, 1979.

Commonweal, September 19, 1969; September 15, 1978, Robert Phillips, review of Elbow Room.

Critique, summer, 1996, p. 314.

Ebony, December, 1981.

Essence, January, 1998, p. 61.

Guardian Weekly, April 16, 1989.

Harper's, December, 1969, Irving Howe, review of Hue and Cry.

Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 1997.

Library Journal, January, 1998, p. 100; June 15, 1998, review of Crabcakes, p. 96; January, 2000, review of A Region Not Home, p. 106.

Nation, December 16, 1978.

Negro Digest, October, 1969; November, 1969.

Newsweek, June 16, 1969; October 17, 1977.

New Yorker, November 21, 1977, review of Elbow Room.

New York Review of Books, November 10, 1977.

New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1969, review of Hue and Cry; September 25, 1977, review of Elbow Room; September 2, 1979; February 13, 1983; May 13, 1984; February 15, 1998, Roy Hoffman, review of Crabcakes, p. 15.

People, March 30, 1998, p. 39.

Publishers Weekly, November 17, 1997, p. 44; December 15, 1997, p. 36; May 4, 1998, p. 196; January 24, 2000, review of A Region Not Home, p. 302.

Saturday Review, May 24, 1969, review of Hue and Cry.

Spectator, November 22, 1969.

Studies in American Fiction, autumn, 1973.

Times Literary Supplement, December 25, 1969.

Washington Post Book World, October 30, 1977; March 6, 1983.

ONLINE

Inertia Online, http://www.inertiamagazine.com/ (August 23, 2004), interview with MacPherson.