The articulated vision of James Alan McPherson needs to be understood as a product of both time and place. Though his writing has a cosmopolitan quality to it that separated him from many of his contemporaries who began writing at the same time in the 1960s, McPherson must be thought of as a Southern writer who came of age as Jim Crow segregation was being put to a slow death.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, on 16 September 1943, James Alan McPherson is the son of James Allen McPherson, an electrician, and his wife, Mabel (née Smalls), a housekeeper. The young McPherson grew up without the sense of fear and awe whites caused in his peers because his father dealt with white people on a daily basis. McPherson shared his father's love for comic books, but soon he traded these for the short stories of Guy de Maupassant. He...