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James Alan McPherson (475 hits)

James Alan McPherson

Savannah-born James Alan McPherson won literary fame for his short stories in the 1960s and 1970s. Winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for his second volume of stories, McPherson then built a reputation as a distinguished editor, teacher, memoirist, and an essayist on American culture.

The second of four children born to James and Mable (Smalls) McPherson, the young McPherson attended St. Mary’s and Paulson Street elementary schools in racially segregated Savannah and graduated in 1961 from A. E. Beach High School, a school founded in 1867 for the education of freed slaves.

In his autobiographical essay “Going Up to Atlanta,“ McPherson wrote, “In Savannah, we lived almost always in poverty: public welfare, clothes from the Salvation Army, no lights or heat for years at a time, double sessions in the segregated public schools, work at every possible job that would pay the bills.” He escaped by reading, either at the Colored Branch of the Carnegie Public Library on East Henry Street, or on West Henry at the Salvation Army, where he picked up secondhand comic books. Words on a page “gave up their secret meanings, spoke of other worlds, made me know that pain was a part of other peoples' lives. After a while, I could read faster and faster and faster and faster. After a while, I no longer believed in the world in which I lived.”

James Alan McPherson https://georgiawritershalloffame.org/honor...