William McPherson, a Pulitzer-winning literary critic and author "who chronicled his decline into poverty," died March 28, the Washington Post reported. He was 84. McPherson was editor of the Post's Book World section in the 1970s and wrote two novels in the 1980s: Testing the Current, which was reissued in 2013 by New York Review Books Classics, and To the Sargasso Sea.
For his book reviews, McPherson applied what the 1977 Pulitzer jury described as a "broad literary and historic perspective" to authors. In a biographical sketch for the Pulitzer, McPherson wrote: "Grateful to be able to pick the books he likes. Does not enjoy reviewing books he does not like." Soon after his win, he moved to the Post's editorial page staff as a letters editor and occasional columnist. "I didn't want to edit Book World anymore," he later told the Chicago Tribune, "because I knew how hard it was to write a book, and I didn't want to criticize other books."
McPherson "was 53 and at the pinnacle of his craft when he left the Post in 1987 to seek adventure in Eastern Europe ahead of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries," the Post noted, adding that "bad investment decisions and health reversals shriveled his savings. To considerable attention, he wrote a self-lacerating essay in 2014 about his slide into what he called the 'upper edge of poverty.' "