ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN WRITER

A posthumous gathering of essays by the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Born in Savannah, McPherson (1943-2016) faced segregation and the proverbial tyranny of low expectations only to defy them with a Harvard Law degree, tenure at several universities, and a MacArthur fellowship. The 1960s, though turbulent, presented promising possibilities: “Opportunities seemed to materialize out of thin air; and if you were lucky, if you were in the right place at the right time, certain contractual benefits just naturally accrued.” One way to be in the right place was to work hard, all the more so if you were one of the “black peasants.” As McPherson writes, while the feeling was “that we could be whatever we wanted,” getting there required overcoming not just “institutional forces,” but also one’s own self-imposed limitations. White supremacy is a very real thing, he writes, but so, too, is the phenomenon whereby some members of minority populations act as “watchdogs over those who challenge, in whatever way, the status quo.” The suggestion, reading between the lines, is that the more-PC-than-thou are impediments just as real as the supremacists, a suggestion that will not go over well in some academic quarters. In a nimble essay that begins, as so often, with the personal—in this case friendship with Bernard Malamud—and expands outward to the universal, McPherson writes of the difficult interactions between Blacks and Jews, who should be natural allies as “spiritual elites” but instead profess antisemitism on the one hand and racism on the other in order to take their places in the American mainstream. While no conservative, McPherson offers sometimes-contrarian views on such matters as affirmative action and advocates otherwise questioning the assumptions of the “prevailing morality.”

Powerfully written and provocative, with subtle but pointed polemics often in play.