Awards
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Elbow Room
Synopses & Reviews
In this deft collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson offers poignant and lively interpretations of life that illuminate the ebb and flow of its sorrows and delights, and reveals his search for connections between everyday drudgery and a greater sense of purpose. He writes of the longing of the human soul by unifying thoughts of his deep affection for his daughter and the meaning of Disneyland; transcendental meanings in life and the tedium of long waits in airports, coming to self-knowledge and the cruel rituals of fraternity pledge week. A beautiful meditation on what it means to be human -- an enlightening and soulful work reaching to the core of suffering and joy.
Review
"He seamlessly mixes classical tags, literary analysis, and down-home stories about his family in these essays, some of which first appeared in The Atlantic and Esquire, McPherson is also writing about his life as a writer, a father, and an African-American.... In other notable essays, he describes Ellison's love for American democracy, a love he compares to Virgil's piety; he contrasts the athletes in his small black college, race-bound Spartan hedgehogs knowing only one way to fight, with his own ambition to be an Athenian fox working against ``the fate of a fixed purpose''; and he notes the growing clash between different ethical systems as immigrants and natives become neighbors....A rich feast for the hungry mind. Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
In this deft collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson offers poignant and lively interpretations of life that illuminate the ebb and flow of its sorrows and delights, and reveals his search for connections between everyday drudgery and a greater sense of purpose. He writes of the longing of the human soul by unifying thoughts of his deep affection for his daughter and the meaning of Disneyland; transcendental meanings in life and the tedium of long waits in airports, coming to self-knowledge and the cruel rituals of fraternity pledge week. A beautiful meditation on what it means to be human -- an enlightening and soulful work reaching to the core of suffering and joy.
Synopsis
In this deft collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson offers poignant and lively interpretations of life that illuminate the ebb and flow of its sorrows and delights, and reveals his search for connections between everyday drudgery and a greater sense of purpose. He writes of the longing of the human soul by unifying thoughts of his deep affection for his daughter and the meaning of Disneyland; transcendental meanings in life and the tedium of long waits in airports, coming to self-knowledge and the cruel rituals of fraternity pledge week. A beautiful meditation on what it means to be human -- an enlightening and soulful work reaching to the core of suffering and joy.
About the Author
James Alan McPherson is the author of Crabcakes, Hue and Cry, Railroad, and Elbow Room, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1978. His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals -- including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly, Newsday, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, and Double-Take -- and anthologies such as volumes of The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and O. Henry Prize Stories. McPherson has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Prize Fellows Award, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He is currently a professor of English at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Table of Contents
Contents On Becoming an American Writer
Foreword to the Collected Stories of Breece Pancake
Grant Hall
El Camino Real
Gravitas
Disneyland
"It Is Good to Be Shifty in a New Country"
The Done Thing
Three Great Ones of the City and One Perfect Soul: Well Met at Cyprus
Junior and John Doe
Ukiyo
Workshopping Lucius Mummius