Obituary Note: James Alan McPherson

James Alan McPherson, the essayist and first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for Elbow Room, a 1978 story collection, died yesterday. He was 72.

McPherson grew up in the segregated South and was, as the New York Times wrote, "an avid comic book reader until he discovered what he called the colored branch of the Carnegie Public Library in Savannah." In Going Up to Atlanta, a memoir, McPherson commented: "At first the words, without pictures, were a mystery. But then, suddenly, they all began to march across the page. They gave up their secret meanings, spoke of other worlds, made me know that pain was a part of other peoples' lives. After a while, I could read faster and faster and faster. After a while, I no longer believed in the world in which I lived."

McPherson graduated from Morris Brown College, a traditionally black school in Atlanta, Harvard Law School and then the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he became a professor. While in law school, he won an Atlantic magazine contest with his short story "Gold Coast," which was included in his first collection, Hue and Cry.

The New York Times wrote that author Suketu Mehta, who was mentored by McPherson, said that his essays "belong to the humanist tradition of American letters: an anger at the economic and racial injustices of the country, coupled with a constant appreciation for the way community forms out of unlikely alliances, such as between poor Southern blacks and Southern whites."

McPherson won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972 and a MacArthur "genius award" in 1981.

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