James Alan McPherson, essayist, short story writer and critic, is part of the generation of African-American writers and intellectuals who were inspired and mentored by Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison was a highly acclaimed scholar and writer. Ellison used racial issues to express universal dilemmas of identity and self-discovery, but did not use his writings as a propaganda tool to valorize his people. “Literature is colorblind,” he once said, “and it should be read and judged within a broader framework.” Many writers disagreed with his beliefs, but McPherson, like Ellison, views African American culture as integrally linked to "white" culture. McPherson does not consider himself a "black writer", but rather compares himself to other practitioners of American short fiction. Although his writing is drawn from his experiences as a black man, he rejects the idea that black or white fiction must necessarily be about certain black or white subjects. James Alan McPherson was born on September 16, 1943, in Savannah, Georgia. He attended Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1963 to 1964 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Morris Brown College in Atlanta in 1965. Subsequently, with the intention of becoming a lawyer, he attended the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa and Yale University Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. He also earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1969. He has taught at various institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard University; the University of Virginia; and the University of Iowa, where he is currently Professor of English at the Writers' Workshop. McPherson also had the opportunity to lecture in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University..