James Alan McPherson, essayist, short story writer, and critic, is part of the generation of African American writers and intellectuals who were inspired and guided 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 he did not use his writing as a propaganda tool to empower his people. “Literature is colorblind,” he once said, “and should be read and judged in a larger picture.” Many writers disagreed with his beliefs, but McPherson, like Ellison, sees African-American culture as integrally connected with "white" culture. McPherson does not consider himself a "black writer", but rather compares himself to other practitioners of American short fiction. Even though his writings are drawn from his experiences as a black man, he rejects the idea that black and white fiction must necessarily be about certain black or white topics. 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 earned a Bachelor of Arts from Morris Brown College in Atlanta in 1965. Later, intending to become a lawyer, he attended Harvard University 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 several institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard University; the University of Virginia; and the University of Iowa, where he is currently a professor of English in the Writers' Workshop. McPherson was also given the opportunity to lecture in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University.