Pulitzer-winning book critic who chronicled his decline into poverty dies at 84

In a life defined by restless searching, William McPherson was a three-time college dropout, a Merchant Marine seaman (“one of my attempts to try on a new identity and escape the world around me”) and a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic for The Washington Post.

He was editor of The Washington Post’s Book World section in the 1970s and wrote two novels in the 1980s, one of which the Atlantic Monthly declared “a flawless literary achievement.” He was 53 and at the pinnacle of his craft when he left The Post in 1987 to seek adventure in Eastern Europe ahead of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.

He freelanced, but bad investment decisions and health reversals shriveled his savings. To considerable attention, he wrote a self-lacerating essay in 2014 about his slide into what he called the “upper edge of poverty” — not quite destitution but where “a roof over your head and a wardrobe that doesn’t look as if it came from the Salvation Army is as good as it gets.”

He described the confluence of events — largely of his own making — that acted as a current tugging him away from the middle class and beaching him on “Grub Street.”

McPherson, 84, died March 28 at a hospice center in Washington, D.C. The cause was complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia, said his daughter, Jane McPherson.

McPherson had come to The Post in 1958 as a copyboy and was travel editor within five years. After an interlude in New York as a senior editor at the publishing firm William Morrow & Co., he was lured back to The Post in 1969 by executive editor Benjamin Bradlee to run Book World.

He poured out reviews, applying what the 1977 Pulitzer jury commended as “broad literary and historic perspective” to authors as varied as poet Archibald MacLeish, essayist and children’s book author E.B. White and novelist Saul Bellow.

In a biographical sketch for the Pulitzer, McPherson wrote in the third-person dry: “Grateful to be able to pick the books he likes. Does not enjoy reviewing books he does not like.”

Soon after his win, he moved to the editorial page staff as a letters editor and occasional columnist. “I didn’t want to edit Book World anymore,” he later told the Chicago Tribune, “because I knew how hard it was to write a book, and I didn’t want to criticize other books.”

Meanwhile, he was busy writing his first novel, the lavishly praised “Testing the Current” (1984). Set on the cusp of World War II, it chronicled the lost innocence of a remarkably observant 8-year-old boy in Michigan who struggles to understand a world that is at once destabilized and destabilizing, with his mother’s affair and the death of a schoolmate.

Writing in the New York Times, author and poet Russell Banks called “Testing the Current” an “extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and . . . permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory.” He placed the book, fictional with some clearly autobiographical elements of McPherson’s Midwestern youth, on equal footing with such first-rate memoirs as Frank Conroy’s “Stop-Time.”