James Alan McPherson
James Alan McPherson
James Alan McPherson, an essayist, short-story writer and critic, is among the generation of African American writers and intellectuals who were inspired and mentored by Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison was a highly acclaimed scholar and writer. Ellison used racial issues to express universal dilemmas of identity and self-discovery, but didn’t use his writing as a propaganda tool to heighten his people. “Literature is colorblind,” he once said “and it should be read and judged in a larger framework.” Many writers disagreed with his beliefs, but McPherson, like Ellison, sees African American culture as integrally connected with the “white” culture. McPherson doesn’t consider himself a “black writer”, but rather compares himself to other practitioners of the American short fiction. Even though his writing is drawn from his experiences as a black man, he rejects the notion that black or white fiction must necessarily concern certain black or white topics.
James Alan McPherson was born September 16, 1943, in Savannah, Georgia. He attended Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1963 to 1964 and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Morris Brown College in Atlanta in 1965. Afterwards with the intention of becoming a lawyer he attended Harvard University Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and the Yale University Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. He also earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1969. He has taught at a variety of institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard University; the University of Virginia; and the University of Iowa, where he is currently a professor of English in the Writers Workshop. McPherson was also given the opportunity to lecture in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University.
James Alan McPherson came forth on the literary scene in 1968 when “Gold Coast,” taken from his first published volume of short fiction, Hue and Cry (1968), won a contest in the Atlantic Monthly. In 2000, John Updike, a prolific writer, also selected “Gold Coast” for his anthology, Best American Short Stories of the Century. McPherson was honored as the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction in 1978, for his most celebrated work of short fiction, Elbow Room (1977). In addition, he has also been the recipient of several prestigious grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972–73), a MacArthur Foundation Award (1981, the so-called “genius” award), several Pushcart Prizes, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. McPherson views himself as a practitioner of short story. His stories have appeared in many different periodicals, including mainstream magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and small-press journals like the Harvard Review and Ploughshares. Hue and Cry (1968) and Elbow Room (1977) are collections of his best work. His memoir, Crabcakes (1998), which records his life from 1976 through his experiences in Japan, is also a series of great stories. Overall McPhersons narrative voice can be described as engaging.
I had the opportunity to read McPherson’s, “The Story of a Scar”. I was drawn in by his depiction of ordinary people in desperate situations. In “The Story of a Scar,” the narrator, who has broken his nose against the headboard of his bed “while engaged in the act of love,” asks a total stranger how she came to have a disfiguring scar across her face and learns more than just the story. The narrator empathizes with the scarred woman. He gets gratification from befriending someone so deformed, but in the end he condemns himself for not even asking her name. Her story becomes a tale of self reflection, reflecting