Overview
A beautiful collection of short stories that explores blacks and whites today, Elbow Room is alive with warmth and humor. Bold and very real, these twelve stories examine a world we all know but find difficult to define.Whether a story dashes the bravado of young street toughs or pierces through the self-deception of a failed preacher, challenges the audacity of a killer or explodes the jealousy of two lovers, James Alan McPherson has created an array of haunting images and memorable characters in an unsurpassed collection of honest, masterful fiction.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of eloquently told stories about black Americans--ministers, professors, convicts, businesswomen--all struggling to protect their individuality and integrity from the demands imposed by others.
Editorials
Sacred Fire
James Alan McPherson is one of the best American short story writers to come out of the 1960s and 1970s. His first volume of short stories, Hue and Cry, was published in the same year he graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of 25. His second collection, Elbow Room, won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.McPherson's prime gift as a writer is his ability to draw utterly believable, and sympathetic, characters. The men and women brought to life in the stories of Elbow Room are folks you already know from the barbershops, trains, and backrooms of black communities North and South. Their words are easy to recognize, and their situations all too familiar. But the familiarity we feel with the characters only heightens the sense of melancholy that pervades these stories. The stories center around the differences between people-differences in race, outlook, beliefs-that more often than not prove to be irreconcilable. Sometimes, those differences are treated to gently comic effect, as in the poignant remembrances of "Why I Love Square Dancing." Other times, the stories evoke rousing black folktales of "bad men," as in "The Story of a Dead Man." And sometimes McPherson, in spite of himself, offers hope, as in the title story, whose main character, Virginia, makes "elbow room" in her head for the differences among people.
This collection offers a wide range of compelling writing, finely drawn characters, and provocative situations. Even when McPherson's stories center on relations between the races, his characters express universal truths about humanity and how we interact in the spaces we share.