James Alan McPherson taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop beginning in 1981.  In 1978, he received a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his Elbow Room.  In 1981, he read his short story, “There was once a State Called Franklin“, the same year he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 1995 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Iowa Digital Library also contains a lecture he presented in 2003 at the Iowa Memorial Union, giving examples of the types of landscapes across the world that have influenced peoples’ thinking and philosophies.

James Alan McPherson died yesterday at the age of 72.