It’s the birthday of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016), the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and a member of the first cohort to receive a MacArthur “genius grant.”

McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia. His mother was a maid, and his father became the first black master electrician in the state, but only after great difficulty: his applications for a license were repeatedly suppressed because he was black. This struggle broke him and he became an alcoholic and did jail time, and McPherson grew up conflicted about his father. McPherson himself did odd jobs to help support his family and siblings.

McPherson was a dining car waiter for the Great Northern Railroad in 1962 and got his undergrad degree at Morris Brown College in Atlanta (1965). He went to Harvard Law School but then entered the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (Genuflect, please.) By then, his first short story, “Gold Coast,” had won a contest in The Atlantic Monthly (1968), which hired him as a contributing editor. His first story collection, Hue and Cry, was published in 1969 and his second collection, Elbow Room (1978), won the Pulitzer for fiction.

McPherson took a position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1981, the same year he received a “genius grant.” But his next book, the memoir Crabcakes, did not appear until 1998; McPherson was focused on being a father to his daughter, who lived with his ex-wife but whom he saw as often as possible. He also spent those years becoming a master teacher and editing lit journals such as Ploughshares. He did not return to writing until his daughter started college.

(Do you ever wonder if maybe the MacArthur “genius grants” actually started out as a joke? That is, if maybe one day John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur were sitting around their mansion sipping tea when through the French doors they spied their gardener stepping on the wrong end of a rake and getting plonked hard on the nose, and Catherine T. says, “Brilliant move, Einstein,” and John D. reaches over to the pile of cash they always keep near the breakfast nook and throws a handful out to the sheepish and sore-nosed gardener while the two of them laugh and laugh, and one thing leads to another and voilà, the MacArthur “genius grant” is born? And that’s why “genius grant” nearly always appears in quotation marks? I do.)

McPherson’s final book, A Region Not Home: Reflections on Exile (2000), was a collection of essays. He died at 72 in Iowa City of complications from pneumonia. “Gold Coast,” which explores the relationship between a black Harvard student working as a janitor and his aging white supervisor, was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (2000, edited by John Updike).

Have a cool, cloudy Monday, for Pete’s sake sneak in a nap if at all possible, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.