James Alan McPherson, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, passed away on July 27, due to causes related to pneumonia. His death was announced by the University of Iowa, where he was professor emeritus. He was 72.

McPherson won the Pulitzer in 1978 for Elbow Room, his second collection of short stories.

Born in 1943 in Savannah, Georgia, McPherson worked as a train passenger-car waiter as a teenager and as a janitor while earning a degree at Harvard Law School. He published his first short story, “Gold Coast, in the Atlantic Monthly when he graduated. His first collection of fiction, Hue and Cry, was published in 1968. Later, he published an essay in the December, 1978 of the Atlantic, "On Becoming an American Writer," and wrote, "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 'citizen of the United States.'"

His work would go on to earn him a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and later a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” as well as induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He earned at MFA from the University of Iowa in 1971 and would later teach there from 1981 until his retirement. Before Iowa, McPherson taught at the University of Virginia.

McPherson’s last book was a collection of essays, A Region Not Home: Reflections From Exile, published in 2000.

Writing for NPR, Glen Weldon, who was once a student of McPherson’s, said, “He believed that to write fiction in America meant writing about class in America, and that young writers must remain mindful of that fact, lest their work come off as callow and shamefully ignorant. … American history was a passion of his, and though his work often evinced a wry humor, in person he struck me as a serious man who cared deeply about the shadow that history casts on the present.”

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