hue and cry james alan mcpherson publish date

Paul Frost seemed attracted to her by outward display of strength. In recognition of his accomplishment, McPherson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. His stories thus unify and interpretively advance themes from the literary tradition of Faulkner and from African-American literature. Part of the dramatic conversation in all McPherson’s stories is his intention to challenge the myth of whiteness and replace it with an understanding that we are all mixed race in one way or another. In the title story, a storyteller in search of material befriends an interracial couple and notes the white husband’s progressive loss of innocence in regard to being married to a mixed-race black wife. McPherson’s particular, remarkable contribution to resolving race questions, as dramatized in his short stories, was to bring to bear a point of view that combined philosophical intellect with what he would call “mother wit,” or instinctive knowing. McPherson, who grew up in segregationist Georgia and went on to graduate from Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, found early and enduring inspiration in Ralph Ellison’s work and, like Ellison, created articulate characters who voiced the painfulness of existence on the dividing line of race. Jones, whose works gained wide recognition later. In the three decades since, Elbow Room and McPherson’s earlier story collection, Hue and Cry, have attracted and retained a dedicated circle of readers who appreciate his artistry and his place in the evolution of literature from older authors, such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, to ones such as Toni Morrison and Edward P. Three years later, he was among a group of twenty-one authors, scientists, and historians to receive the first MacArthur Fellowships, popularly known as “genius awards.” Other recipients that year included Robert Penn Warren and Joseph Brodsky. In 1978 James Alan McPherson became the first African-American man to win the Pulitzer Prize, for his story collection Elbow Room.

(Fiction Little, Brown, 1977 repr., Fawcett, 1986)

Hue and cry james alan mcpherson publish date