James Alan McPherson

McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943, the son of one of the city's few Black electricians; he worked his way through Morris Brown College and Harvard Law School before abandoning law for the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, where Ralph Ellison became a lasting friend and mentor.

Elbow Room (1977), his second collection, gathered stories of Black and white Americans colliding, sometimes violently, sometimes with unexpected tenderness, across the fault lines of race, class, and region, its ironic, generous voice winning McPherson the Pulitzer Prize in 1978, the first ever awarded to a Black writer in fiction.

He taught for decades at the University of Iowa, becoming one of the Workshop's most beloved instructors and a MacArthur Fellow, and continued publishing essays and stories on race and community until his death in Iowa City in 2016.