James Alan McPherson (born September 16, 1943 in Savannah, Georgia) is a United States novelist and short story writer and a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973. He won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his short story collection, Elbow Room. His work has appeared in twenty-seven journals and magazines, seven short-story anthologies, and The Best American Essays. In 1995, McPherson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been educated at Morris Brown College, Harvard Law School, The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and the Yale Law School. He has taught English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harvard, and also lectured in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University. He is now a professor of English at University of Iowa.

In 2000, John Updike selected his short story "Gold Coast" for his collection Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin).

Story collections:

• Elbow Room 1977

Other:

• Hue and Cry 1969
• Crabcakes 1998
• A Region Not Home 2000

1943 births | Living people | African American writers | American short story writers | Pulitzer Prize winners