James Alan McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943. He earned a B.A. at Morris Brown College, an LL.B. at Harvard Law School and an M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
His books include the story collections Hue and Cry (1969) and Elbow Room (1977) and the memoir Crabcakes (1998). Elbow Room won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He taught for many years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and died in Iowa City in 2016.