“I think that love must be the ability to suspend one’s intelligence for the sake of something.
At the basis of love therefore must live imagination.”
After five decades of awarding fiction prizes, the Pulitzer Prize finally saw fit to honor its first African American writer in 1978 with James Alan McPherson, who won the prize for his wonderful short story collection Elbow Room. McPherson was a creative writing professor and soon-to-be-famous-teacher at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa (where his tenure began in 1981). He was known to be a soft-spoken man with considerable humility and patience –both admirable traits that are quietly reflected in his short stories. After receiving praise for his debut short story collection entitled Hue and Cry (1969), McPherson published his second and final work of fiction eight years later with Elbow Room (1977), a collection of twelve eclectic short stories, earning him a finalist spot on the National Book Award list and winning him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1978.
Now, you might be tempted to fabricate a stereotype or cliché in your mind of James “Jim” McPherson and his stories, but your initial impressions would surely be false. Elbow Room presents an array of distinct stories filled with nuance and humor, and most of them are about black Americans who walk through richly woven cosmopolitan worlds where various oddities of the human condition lay themselves bare before our eyes. In these stories, no person stands apart as a monolithic caricature. Instead, McPherson’s characters are vividly imagined beings, each one representing a carefully crafted tapestry. They are entirely unique individuals, often in search of spiritual satisfaction and cultural belonging while bucking received social stereotypes.
For example, in “Why I Like Country Music” (the first short story in Elbow Room), McPherson writes about a black man who grew up in the South and privately confesses that he enjoys country music and square dancing –“No one will believe that I like country music,” he says. Much of the story is a letter to his wife Gloria, a Northern woman whom he resents for her perceived cultural superiority, and in looking back, he remembers his first love –a girl from New York in his fourth-grade class named Gweneth Lawson. “Even when I cannot remember her face, I remember the rainbow of deep, rich colors in which she lived” (12). One day in spring, he is finally permitted to square dance at school with Gweneth and this memory helps to explain the complexities of his identity as a black man from the segregated South, who is married to a Northern woman, but who nevertheless has nostalgia for the innocence of his youth even though he left it all behind for a New York career. In this respect, he feels distance from his wife –“What I do know is that, while the two of us are black, the distance between us is sometimes as great as that between Ibo and Yoruba” (10).
“I know I smiled, dear Gloria. I smiled with the lemon-ness of her and the loving of her pressed deep into those saving places of my private self. It was my plan to savor these, and I did savor them. But when I reached New York, many years later, I did not think of Brooklyn. I followed the old, beaten, steady paths into uptown Manhattan. By then I had learned to dance to many other kinds of music. And I had forgotten the savory smell of lemon. But I think sometimes of Gweneth now when I hear country music. And although it is difficult to explain to you, I still maintain that I am no mere arithmetician in the art of the square dance. I am into the calculus of it” (31).
In “The Story of a Dead Man,” we are treated to the portrait of a chaotic ruffian named Billy Renfro, the narrator’s cousin, William, who seems to find himself in endless mischief and criminal activity –Billy is characterized by a “careless search for an exciting death.” However, the narrator wishes to correct the record about Billy’s life: “I bother to refute these rumors because the man is my cousin, and I am honor-bound to love him as I know he really is. He and I are one with the same ancestors, and whatever fires rage in him I must look to find smolderings of within myself. Recognizing this obligation, I here attempt to deflate mean rumors circulated by his enemies, cut through the fat of Billy’s own lies, and lay bare the muscles of his life. From youth onward, he has possessed a warm heart and a certain tolerance for misfortune; and he is as likely, for a friend, to strip the shirt from his back as he is to murder. That he contains such broad extremes speaks favorably of his eventual reform” (34). Billy is a wild gallivanting shyster, a spinner of yarns, the son of an alcoholic and an invalid, a careless philanderer who impregnates a loose woman, stabs a man during a dice game, serves time in prison, is paroled seven years later, loses his left eye, and works for Mr. Floyd Dillingham, a liberal man who believes in second chances –“the job was to track down Negroes who had defaulted on their car payments.” The story concludes with the narrator introducing Billy to his fiancé Chelseia Floyd and her parents but after a night of drinking, the whole evening goes awry.
I was careful to note the complicated life of the narrator in this story as it is subtly conveyed in brief flashbacks. William hails from the South and once had dreams of settling in Los Angeles but he only got as far as Chicago, settling in “against this city’s soul-killing winds” wherein “I purged from my speech all traces of the South and warmed myself by the fire of my thirty-year plan.” Like other characters in McPherson’s stories, William has a complex relationship with his Southern past.
“The Silver Bullet” is a fairly straightforward tale about a young boy who hopes to join a street gang called the Henry Street guys. But first he must take a “silver bullet” at a local establishment called Slick’s Bar and Grill. “He hurried away from Henry Street, thinking it through. He still wanted to get into the organization. He felt that a man should belong to something representative. He was not against people going to work or joining churches or unions if these things represented them. But he wanted something more. And the Henry Street guys were not really bad, he thought. The papers just made them out to be that way” (61). In the end, after a near-lethal scuffle, the bar in question is shown to be in league with the mob and we are reminded that these street gangs are merely the denizens of young boys who are simply looking for a place to belong.
“The Faithful” is about John Butler, a prideful, stubborn old barber who is also a fiery preacher at Second Cavalry Church, but he refuses to change with the times. Both his church and his barbershop are facing declining attendees (many of whom are going over Reverend Tarwell on 138th or Mickey on 145th) –“They still tryin’ to starve us out,” he says. And it becomes apparent that Butler is out of step with the new haircut styles, as well, along with the popular “power to the people” style of preaching. Still, he refuses to give up –”You can shape a boy’s life by what you do to his hair.”
In “Problems of Art,” Mrs. Mary Farragot is a poor widow living on social security in Los Angeles (her apartment displays a cohort of pictures including a “portrait of a sad-eyed Jesus”). She is in trouble with the law for driving under the influence, and after a lengthy proceeding at the DMV, she is let off the hook only to celebrate by drinking some Maker’s Mark. Perhaps she was not entirely innocent of her crimes. In “The Story of a Scar” we enter a plastic surgery office led by Dr. Wayland, where a man with a damaged nose sits in the waiting room and interrogates another patient, a woman with a scarred face, asking her how she received her scar. She then vaults into a lengthy tale about a romantic dispute that turned violent. But by the end of the story, our protagonist suddenly finds newfound sympathy for her as he finally asks: “Sister … what is your name?”
In “I Am An American” a black couple from Atlanta (Leroy and Eunice) travel from Paris to London where they encounter some Japanese students who are robbed by a man who appears to be “Bulgarian.” They agree to help, since the Japanese students only speak broken English and they have lost all their money and passports. “Widows and Orphans” traces the wandering thoughts of Louis Clayton as he receives a civic award at a banquet in Los Angeles. In particular, he reflects on his failed romance with a student named Clair.
In “A Loaf of Bread,” a white grocer named Harold Green is caught raising prices at one of his stores in a black community. He claims that, as his name indicates, all he truly cares about is “green” (or money). But despite his capitalistic defense for charging higher prices, Harold faces an onslaught of news coverage and street protests, especially from the likes of Nelson Reed who attacks Green on religious grounds. Soon Harold Green’s store begins bleeding dry, but Nelson Reed returns in the end after his wife had forgotten to pay for bread one day. He reminds Green that they are all indebted to the government (perhaps there is always someone to scapegoat). “Just Enough for the City” conveys a highly cosmopolitan neighborhood and the effects of religious proselytizers on a black community, from Germans and Muslims to a sect called the Redeemer’s Friends.
“A Sense of Story” is another tale that explores the black experience inside the American judicial system. Robert Charles is a black defendant charged with the murder of his auto shop boss, Frank Johnson. As the judge reads through the court transcript of the trial (which comprises the bulk of the story) a narrative becomes clear to him –Charles had once invented an engine lubricant that was exploited by his boss. In other words, he apparently faced mistreatment from his employer. The prosecution decided to focus its attacks squarely on Charles’s character (his drinking, carrying a gun, and by invoking prejudice against his race) but just when the judge starts to see things more clearly, Charles blurts out: “’It wasn’t no accident,’ he told them in a calm voice. ‘I had me nine bullets and a no-good gun. Gentlemens, the onliest thing I regret is the gun broke before I could pump more than six slugs into the sonofabitch’” (231).
In “Elbow Room” (the titular story of the collection), a narrator befriends an interracial couple –Paul Frost, a white philosophically-minded man from a small town, and Virginia Valentine, a confident and worldly black woman– and he describes the labors of their love. How does their relationship work? “…after I had come to understand better, I began to see deeper into their bond. She was an eagle with broken wings spread, somewhat awkwardly, over the aristocratic soul of a simple farm boy. Having his soul intact made him a vulnerable human being. But having flown so high herself, and having been severely damaged, she still maintained too much grace, and too complete a sense of the treachery in the world, to allow any roughness to touch the naked thing. Paul Frost was a very lucky innocent. Virginia Valentine was protecting him to heal herself” (264-265). The story concerns their internal struggle over the identity of their soon-to-be-born baby boy –“I don’t want my baby to be an honorary white” (280). Will the baby be “black and blind” or will he pass “for white and self-blinded”? This story warmly explores the fragmented love of two people from entirely different backgrounds as they bring new life into the world. It is a fitting crescendo for this collection.
McPherson dedicated the book Elbow Room to the memory of his father and his wife Sarah along with “the residents of both our houses.” He opens the book with an epigraph from the American poet Sterling Allen Brown:
“I don’t know which way I’m travelin’–
Far or near,
All I know fo’ certain is
I cain’t stay here.”
–“Long Gone” by Sterling A. Brown
********
In evaluating Elbow Room in 1977, Robie Macauley, a former editor of The Kenyon Review, wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “He [James Alan McPherson] was able to look beneath skin color and clichés of attitude into the hearts of his characters… a fairly rare ability in American fiction where even the most telling kind of perception seldom seems able to pass an invisible color line.”
In many respects I am delighted to agree with this assessment. Elbow Room manages that rare feat in American literature of rejecting cliché, while still exploring the varying shades of moral grey along our imagined cultural boundaries. Today, it is a shame that McPherson has not received greater widespread literary recognition, though being such a shy, kind-hearted man, perhaps he would have wanted it this way. Within the pages of his stories, his characters simply sing with life, and as readers we get to know them in a fairly intimate manner, warts and all, even with their myriad fragmented identities and internal contradictions. They reveal an often neglected side of the American experience.
McPherson stated on several occasions that he did not consider himself to be a black writer per se, but rather an American writer first and foremost. He said, “Certain of the people happen to be black and certain happen to be white; but I have tried to keep the color part of most of them far in the background, where these things should rightly be kept.” When writing about Albion W. Tourgee’s brief in the notorious Plessy vs. Ferguson case (1896) in The Atlantic in 1978, McPherson wrote: “What he was proposing in 1896, I think, was that each United States citizen would attempt to approximate the ideals of the nation, be on at least conversant terms with all its diversity, carry the mainstream of the culture inside himself… As an American, by trying to wear these clothes he would be a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal. If he could live with these contradictions, he would be simply a representative American… 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.’”
Notable Quotations:
“You would not know or remember, as I do, that in those days, in our area of the country, we enjoyed a pleasingly ironic mixture of Yankee and Confederate folkways. Our meals and manners, our speech, our attitudes toward certain ambiguous areas of history, even our acceptance of tragedy as the normal course of life –these things and more defined us as Southern. Yet the stern morality of our parents, their toughness and penny-pinching and attitudes toward work, their covert allegiance toward certain ideals, even the directions toward which they turned our faces, made us more Yankee than Cavalier. Moreover, some of our schools were named for Confederate men of distinction, but others were named for the stern-faced believers who had swept down from the North to save a people back, long ago, n those long-forgotten days of once upon a time. Still, our schoolbooks, our required classroom songs, our flags, our very relation to the statues and monuments in public parks, negated the story that these dreamers from the North had ever come. We sang the state song, memorized the verses of homegrown poets, honored in our books the names and dates of historical events both before and after that Historical Event which, in our region, supplanted even the division of the millennia introduced by the followers of Jesus Christ. Given the silent circumstances of our cultural environment, it was ironic, and perhaps just, that we maintained a synthesis of two traditions no longer supportive of each other. Thus it became traditional at our school to celebrate the arrival of spring on May first by both the ritual plaiting of the Maypole and Square Dancing” (21, from “Why I Like Country Music”).
“From time to time, trudging through the winter slush on Michigan, I would pause to explore a reflection of myself in a store window. By my fifth year in Chicago, I became satisfied that no one could have mistaken me for a refugee from the South” (42, from “The Story of a Dead Man”).
“He had been born in North Carolina and now he lived in Chicago. Louis was certain of at least this much. He had been born in one kind of world and now lived in another, but in this new world all the old world rules had been changed” (171, from “Widows and Orphans”).
“From the plane, the first view of the city was magnificent. Looking down he saw millions of green, blue, white, yellow, and red lights coalescing into lines, squares, triangles, and stars in the rust-brown light of dusk. A blue and brown sky hung neatly over the city like a warm blanket. There was a feeling of space one had to take inside oneself. Louis had felt completed” (175, from “Widows and Orphans”).
“It was one of those obscene situations, pedestrian to most people, but invested with meaning for a few poor folk whose lives are usually spent outside the imaginations of their fellow citizens” (185, from “A Loaf of Bread”).
“When she returned home, at twenty-two, she was bursting with stories to tell. There were many like her. In Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and all parts of California, people gathered in groups and told similar stories. They thought in terms new to them. In conversation they remarked on common points of reference in the four quarters of the world. The peasants among them had become aristocratic without any of the telling affectations. The aristocrats by birth had developed an easy, common touch. They considered themselves a new tribe” (259-260, from “Elbow Room”).
On the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1978 fiction jury consisted of the following three members (including veteran Carlos Baker):
- Chair: Carlos Baker (1909-1987) returned again after previously serving on Pulitzer juries. He was the former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton (his PhD dissertation explored the influence of Spencer on Shelley’s poetry), retiring in 1977. He penned a critically lauded biography of Ernest Hemingway (authorized) in 1969 which was nevertheless criticized by Hemingway’s third wife Martha Gellhorn. Baker also wrote well-regarded biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he edited volumes of poetry on Shelley, Keats, Longfellow, Coleridge, Fielding, and others. He contributed book reviews for numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, he published a novel entitled “A Friend in Power” in 1958, and a collection of poetry entitled “A Year and a Day” in 1963. In 1976, Mr. Baker served as chairman for the editorial committee of the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration which selected 100 masterpieces of American literature for publication by the Franklin Library. During his tenure at Princeton, Baker was the teacher of A. Scott Berg, the contemporary biographer who has written bestselling books about Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, Katharine Hepburn, Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Lindbergh (a book which later won the Pulitzer itself).
- Margaret Manning (~1921-1984) was a native of Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Kenilworth, Illinois before she attended Vassar College. She was an American journalist and book reviewer who initially began working for the United Press in Washington and The Chicago Tribune. She later became the book editor at The Boston Globe for the final ten years of her life, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She was a founding member and director of the National Book Critics Circle. Mrs. Manning was married to journalist Robert J. Manning, who served as the London bureau chief for Time Magazine, Sunday Editor of The New York Herald Tribune, and editor in chief of The Atlantic (he also served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President John F. Kennedy). She died of cancer in 1984 and was survived by her husband and three sons.
- Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) had a lengthy academic career as a professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and prior to 1982, he taught at Northwestern University and Cornell University. He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He also published a series of detective stories. He was an alumnus of the University of Notre Dame and received his MA and PhD from Yale University where he completed his dissertation on Wordsworth under the direction of Harold Bloom. He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
The three jury members unanimously nominated Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (the goal of unanimity was set forth by chair Carlos Baker). The jury did not bring forward any other nominations for the prize, though they did acknowledge admiration for several other books, including Peter Taylor’s In the Miro District, Anne Tyler’s Earthly Possessions, Paul Horgan’s The Thin Mountain Air, William Maxwell’s Over by the River, and “for various reasons one or two others.” There were also books published that same year by well-known authors that fell below the standards of excellence sought by the jury (some of those writers included Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, John Hersey, Walker Percy, Hortense Calisher, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Shirley Ann Grau, and Toni Morrison).
Carlos Baker personally mentioned several debut novels of note released in 1977: Jon Hassler’s Staggerford, Don Robertson’s Miss Margaret Ridpath (with severe reservations starting about ¾ of the way through), and Mark Helprin’s Refiner’s Fire. He also mentioned lesser novels like Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances and Howell Raines’s Whiskey Man.
In praise of Elbow Room (as well as McPherson’s previous collection Hue and Cry), Margaret Manning wrote that McPherson “…has now established himself as one of the most skillful and penetrating story-tellers in America. He is an American writer who happens to be black and who believes –as his stories so strongly indicate—that American culture has been influenced by blackness in as important a way as by other ethnic contributors, but he refuses to allow anger to come between him and his art… The twelve stories in his latest volume map out the psychic terrain of Black culture as neither alien (spiritually, at least) impoverished, but as a true culture, a version of life which makes possible the discovery of memory, regret, and love. Neither revolutionary not merely picturesque, his fiction is in the best sense of the word imaginative. His language, his narrative skills, and his characters span a wife range from the most self-consciously cultured to the most folksy and colloquial, but consistently enlivened, at all levels of style and substance, by a firm intelligence and compassion for the things that make us all human beings, and for those aspects of living that fiction, perhaps, can best tell us apart.”
The 1970s was a decade in which the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction celebrated a higher number of short story collections, including The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford winning in 1970, Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson winning in 1978, and The Stories of John Cheever rounding out the decade with a Pulitzer victory in 1979. The 1970s was also unusual because there were three years in which the Pulitzer issued no fiction award at all (1971, 1974, and 1977).
Note that while James Alan McPherson was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize specifically in the Fiction category, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in any category was Gwendolyn Brooks for Annie Allen in the Poetry category (1950).
Lastly, in 1978 a special citation was awarded to E.B. White “For his letters, essays and the full body of his work” which included Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952) among other stories.
Who is James Alan McPherson?
James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) was born in the segregated South in Savannah, Georgia, on September 16, 1943, the second of four children. His father was the first qualified black master electrician recognized in the state of Georgia (but only after he was continually denied his license; having faced many frustrations and delays due to racial discrimination, he was driven him to alcoholism and gambling debts which resulted in a brief stint in jail). His mother (the former Mabel Small) worked as a maid while James helped support the family by delivering newspapers. In his essay “Going Up To Atlanta,” McPherson later described the many odd jobs he worked in his youth to help support his mother, brother, and sisters, including the summers he worked as a railroad dining car waiter. He read a great many comic books, but his life was changed when he discovered the “colored branch” of the Carnegie Public Library in Savannah that changed his life and opened up the great mysteries of the written word to him.
He attended Morgan State University from 1963 to 1964 (where he was known to fellow students as “Mac”) before receiving his undergraduate degree in History and English on a scholarship from the historically black college Morris Brown College in 1965. In 1968, McPherson received an LL.B. from Harvard Law School, where he partially financed his studies by working as a janitor for an apartment building on Massachusetts Avenue. While at Harvard, he studied fiction writing under Alan Lebowitz in 1967. While still in law school, he won a contest sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly magazine for a semi-autobiographical short story called “Gold Coast” about the relationship between a black aspiring writer supporting himself as a janitor and his older white supervisor. The story was included in Hue and Cry, his first short story collection published in 1969. He ultimately decided against a legal career and instead enrolled in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa where he received a master of fine arts degree (and briefly studied with the short-story writer and novelist Richard Yates).
The Atlantic hired McPherson as a contributing editor (thanks to McPherson’s friendship with Atlantic editor Edward Weeks), and some of his articles at The Atlantic addressed social ills, such as exposing exploitative business practices against black homeowners. He famously interviewed Ralph Ellison which led to their lengthy friendship. He later left The Atlantic over objections regarding an author’s attempt at linking race with intelligence. He worked as a tenured professor at the University of Virginia and in 1978 his next collection of short stories Elbow Room won the Pulitzer Prize, however it was to be his last published work of fiction during his lifetime, though he did publish a variety of nonfiction books, including a memoir entitled Crabcakes in 1998. Why did McPherson stop publishing fiction after Elbow Room? Apparently, he was a soft-spoken man who was primarily focused on his teaching career from the late 1970s onward. The Chicago Tribune once characterized him as being “only slightly more gregarious than J.D. Salinger.” His first original work following 1978 was his memoir Crabcakes published two decades after Elbow Room. And his last published work, A Region Not Home: Reflections on Exile, was published in 2000.
He married the former Sarah Lynn Charlton. They had a daughter but their marriage ended in divorce.
McPherson was known to his friends as a fairly quiet man with a genuine, kind heart and an outrageous sense of humor. For example, his answering machine and business cards all included phrases like the following: “Mr. Jefferson is not at home, he’s down at the cabins making contradictions.” Another example is a business card he made that read: “James ‘Biff’ McPherson, Free-Lance Public Intellectual,” (with several hilarious slogans prominently featured, like “You sit, I bullshit” and “Special Discount on Ebonics”).
McPherson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, and three years after winning the Pulitzer in 1978, he became one of twenty-one creators selected for the inaugural MacArthur “genius grants” in 1981 (in spite of a somewhat judgmental letter from his mentor, the novelist Ralph Ellison, who lamented McPherson’s “current restlessness” in the wake of giving up his tenured professorship at the University of Virginia and ending his marriage). Other recipients that year included Robert Penn Warren and Joseph Brodsky. In later life, McPherson also won Iowa’s Paul Engle Prize literary award in 2011, and a park in Iowa City was posthumously named in his honor around 2021 (the park sits close to the neighborhood where he had lived for many decades).
In addition to teaching at the University of Virginia, he also taught at UC Santa Cruz, Harvard University summer school, Morgan State University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where he taught for many years and even served as acting director of the program for two years following the death of Frank Conroy in 2005). He was also a visiting scholar at Yale Law School, a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and he lectured in Japan. Among the many fellow writers he influenced included future Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward P. Jones, and Suketu Mehta, whose memoir Maximum City was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005 (McPherson’s own lifelong friend and mentor was Ralph Ellison).
McPherson died in hospice due to complications from pneumonia on July 27, 2016. He was 72 years old. He was survived by a daughter, Rachel McPherson (a child from his first marriage to the former Sarah Charlton, which had ended in divorce), and a son from another relationship, Benjamin Miyamot. His death was publicly announced by the Writers’ Workshop in 2016 where he was professor emeritus.
Notably, in 2023 the Association of Writers and Writing Programs renamed an award after McPherson, calling it the “James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel.”
Film Adaptations:
- None.
Further Reading:
- Hue and Cry: Stories (1969) by James Alan McPherson.
- Crabcakes: A Memoir (1998) by James Alan McPherson.
Literary Context 1977-1978:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1977): awarded to Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984) “for a creative poetic writing, which illuminates man’s condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars.” Aleixandre was the first Spanish author living in Spain to win the prize since before General Franco established his four-decade-long civil war of the 1930s because the 1956 recipient Juan Ramon Jimenez was actually a Spanish Civil War exile living in Puerto Rico
- National Book Award Winner (1978): Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle.
- Booker Prize Winner (1977): Staying On by Paul Scott.
- Christopher Tolkien worked with Guy Gavriel Kay in 1977 to complete and publish his late father’s work, The Silmarillion. Per Publishers Weekly, it was the bestselling novel in 1977. Other bestselling that year included The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough and The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré, as well as several others I did not recognize.
- This was the year that Norman Mailer notoriously punched Gore Vidal in the face at a New York party (only a handful of years after their infamous dust-up on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971).
- The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson was published.
- The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was published.
- In the Heart of the County by J.M. Coetzee was published.
- A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick was published.
- The Shining by Stephen King was published.
- The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carre was published.
- Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtrywas published.
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison was published.
- The Mauritius Command by Patrick O’Brian was published.
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson was published.
- The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Despite overlooking Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in 1978, the Pulitzer Prize nevertheless made a superlative selection with James Alan McPherson’s short story collection Elbow Room. This provocative collection gathers a unique potpourri of American stories that examine the kaleidoscope of race and identity in our modern cosmopolitan society. What is most striking to me about this collection is McPherson’s quiet resistance to cliché –his calm and patient observations of black Americans, many of which defy simplistic definition, are neither the stories of natural heroes nor villains, but rather they are above all portraits of real people with particular nuances, struggles, questions, absurdities, superstitions, flaws, mistakes, and successes. And all the characters seem to face a similar craving for satiation and spiritual depth. In my view, Elbow Room is a lesser known gem among the Pulitzer Prize-winners and I found myself charmed by its warmth, candor, and humor.
McPherson, James Alan. Elbow Room. Fawcett Books, an imprint of Random House, New York, NY (1977).