Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Alan McPherson, 72

James Alan McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection Elbow Room, has died aged 72.

McPherson, a longtime faculty member at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, died at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City from complications of pneumonia.

A native of Savannah, Georgia, and graduate of Harvard Law School who chose instead to become a writer, McPherson was best known for Elbow Room, candid and compassionate takes on race and the misunderstandings between black and white.

Published in 1977, Elbow Room was praised by the New York Times for the “fine control of language and story”, “depth in his characters” and “humane values”, and made McPherson the first African-American to win the fiction Pulitzer.

His other works included the story collection Hue And Cry and the memoir Crabcakes. In 1981, McPherson was named a MacArthur fellow.

He taught at several schools, notably at Iowa, home to one of America’s oldest and most elite creative writing programmes.

One of his former students, fiction writer Nathan Englander, tweeted that McPherson was a “great writer, a great thinker, & a generous teacher”.