A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

by James Alan McPherson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Elbow Room shares his observations on a wide range of topics, from the significance of Disneyland, to waiting in airports, to the cruel rituals of fraternity hazing.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir

320 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 2000

About the author

James Alan McPherson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and essayist. He spent his early career writing short stories and essays, almost without exception, for The Atlantic. At the age of 35, McPherson received a Pulitzer Prize for his collection of stories, Elbow Room (1978). He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973) and the MacArthur Foundation Award (the so-called "Genius Award"; 1981) and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He is perhaps most often quoted for propounding this philosophy of American citizenship: "I believe that if one can experience diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself 'citizen of the United States.'"

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

When this selection of 12 essays first appeared in 2000, its soft cover the next year, it was met with a curious silence. Perhaps events of those years kept folk from paying attention. Indeed, I did not pay it much mind, although several of the pieces had been published by magazines in the book's immediate foreground, I had read the piece on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while at least parts of McPherson's superb reading of Othello, "Three Great Ones of the City and One Perfect Soul: Well Met at Cyprus," had not escaped my notice -- nor that I had read some 17 years earlier McPherson's essay on his student, the short story writer Breece Pancake when Pancake's stories appeared in 1983. To these three terrific essays, a reader of the present volume will be especially grateful for "Grant Hall," "El Camino Real," "The Done Thing," "Junior and John Doe" and "Ukiyo" -- each in their own way moving.

But as to the silence -- I must report a different sort of suspicion. A Region Not Home is so counter to the discourse we hear presently about African American literature and life, that I can't help but ask myself, where were the young African American intellectuals when this book was published? Or the older ones, the literary scholars, say, like Houston Baker or Henry Louis Gates? McPherson emerges from Savannah, Georgia in the early Sixties and got taken up into an intellectual tradition split between the "specific trusts" of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist compacts with white Southern First Reconstructionists, like General Samuel Armstrong, from whom (among others) Washington secured the funding of Tuskegee, and the double consciousness of W. E. B. DuBois, whose encouragement to "the ten thousand thousand" was to pursue through the free spirit of intellectual growth that "self-conscious manhood" permitted by striving for a "better and truer self." Let's put this in brief: While the McPherson volume appeared at the Centenary reconsideration of The Souls of Black Folk, McPherson could be construed as only a complicated DuBoisian. McPherson had pursued his own specific trusts through Morris Brown College to Harvard Law, and from there to Iowa, and the Writers Workshop. He did not go into law but wrote as a journalist peculiarly sensitive to contract, and with The Atlantic Monthly, he wrote an extraordinary 30,000 word documentary-narrative account (alas, not collected here) of the Contract Buyer's League, a community organization on the West Side of Chicago attempting to repair existing contracts within the real estate market that had red-lined and block busted African Americans from neighborhoods all over Chicago. (This narrative-documentary work became the basis for Te-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations.") That is, while McPherson established his academic career in creative writing by publishing his two short story collections, his real legacy as a literary journalist did not start coming into focus until the publication of this curiously overlooked book.

Yet this collection of essays -- strongly self-exposing, brilliantly analytical, undefended from expectations of ideological formation among the ranks of the African American elite, and, as I have already written above, terrifically moving -- is mostly work from the mid-to-late Nineties. McPherson belongs to a tradition of literary journalists that stretches from Washington to the intellectual tradition Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and just behind him, Marilynne Robinson -- a new New Humanist tradition. This collection, meanwhile, will outlive many another bright polemic.

[Steven Walle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a compligation of writings from the author's life. It covers many topics from bigotry to intergration, from intellectualism to being humble.
The author was an intellectual contempary of the Author Mr. Ralph Ellison the writer of the Invisible Man.
Please read, enjoy and Be Blessed.
Diamond

[anyaaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this collection of essays shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, in one of those beautiful instances where life and literature seemed to cohere perfectly. McPherson's call for a common human ethic echoes Obama's transcendental rhetoric of a post-racial society; central to the collection is the negotiation of racial identity. McPherson probes the meaning of African-American experiences as they relate to the larger polity while at the same time diagramming universal ethical codes in a style of regal simplicity. His certitude is seductive.

[V · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just read McPherson's Pulitzer-winning collection of short stories, Elbow Room. Impressed with the clarity of the stories, I decided to follow up with this collection of McPherson's nonfiction from the 1990s thinking, I suppose, that these essays would be equally approachable.

I was incorrect. Many of the essays in A Region Not Home lean toward the abstract and academic. Some examples:
*In the third piece, "Grant Hall," mostly about the author's experience as an undergraduate at a HBC in Atlanta, McPherson compares the social structure at his college to certain aspects of ancient Greek society. Okay, weird but whatever.
*The fourth essay in this collection, "El Camino Real," made my head spin. It starts with a man panhandling in Palo Alto and goes on to discuss gated communities, speculate on the reasons for the increasing prevalence of the memoir in modern literature, bring up St. Augustine, Plato's allegory of the cave, Gandhi, concepts of reincarnation and afterlife... and it managed to annoy the hell out of me by referring to Latino individuals as "Spanish." I do have an inkling what McPherson was aiming to communicate in this piece but I ended up feeling like he was trying to make it as abstruse as possible for some strange and petty reason.
*I was ready to work myself back into a lather when I found discussion of Aristotle's ideas on friendship in the fifth essay, "Gravitas," about Ralph Ellison. Fortunately, Aristotle left the room rather quickly and I ended up learning a fair bit about Ellison and a thing or two about Richard Wright.
*I was unsurprised when I found that in a book published in 2000, McPherson wrote about the OJ Simpson murder case (in "Three Great Ones of the City and One Perfect Soul") and amused and a bit horrified when I found that he used Simpson as a springboard to discuss Shakespeare's Othello. For fifty pages. I hadn't been itching to read about either Othello or Orenthal.

Clearly, I did not know what McPherson was all about when I picked up A Region Not Home. I'll definitely read his first collection of fiction, Hue and Cry and I might be interested in a collection of McPherson's more journalistic work. However, I will probably give the collection published this year a pass (On Becoming an American Writer), especially because half of the pieces in that collection are in this one as well.

[David Gagen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written collection of essays that showcase the author's deep fascination and concern for the human soul & the search for a greater sense of purpose. Relationships between father & daughter form a central part, as do discussions on race & identity. Only the long chapter on Othello is difficult to understand without detailed understanding of the play. Most of the other essays feature more mundane and everyday experiences that are transformed into insightful observations.

[Dalyn Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Region Not Home is a powerful, thoughtful collection that blends memoir, social reflection, and personal insight with remarkable clarity. James Alan McPherson’s voice is observant, honest, and deeply human as he explores everything from cultural contradictions to the subtle emotional weight of exile. Each essay feels alive, layered, and meaningful the kind of writing that lingers long after the page is turned.