The Atlantic Monthly's Contributing Editor and Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson says in The Atlantic's biography of him: "I believe that if one can experience diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself a citizen of the United States."

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BIOGRAPHY
James McPherson (b. 1943) was born in Savannah, Georgia. In 1969, he earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, where he has been a professor of English since 1981. McPherson received first prize in the Atlantic Monthly short story contest in 1965, and in 1969, his first collection of short stories, Hue and Cry, was published.

His many honors include the literature award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1970) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972-73). He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his second collection of short stories, Elbow Room. His writing achievements earned him a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. McPherson has been widely praised for his incisive depictions of African Americans attempting to cope with the indignities and desperations of everyday life.