hue and cry james alan mcpherson publish date

What struck me, as I again read Hue and Cry for perhaps the third or fourth time in 2018, is how powerful and at times strangely frightening the first five stories of the book are with their men and the often crushing burden of their work. I do not now remember how quickly I read all of Jim’s stories, but it could not have been more than a day-college work must have been pushed to the side for several hours. I felt I knew this man because he looked like me. Jim, obviously a long way from being even thirty years old, stood almost shyly in a peacoat, looking as if having his picture taken would never be one of the things he would get used to doing. Perhaps it was because their photos were those of seasoned, established, older writers. Standing in the bookstore aisle, I had a growing feeling that I knew that man in the photograph in a way that I had not felt years earlier seeing pictures of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison on the backs of their books. And on the back, a black-and-white stamp-size photograph of Jim, as I would come to know him, as a graduate student more than ten years later at the University of Virginia. And because Dinand Library at the Cross was still several months away from being a place that I, a black sophomore at a predominantly white school, could comfortably go and know that I could find something familiar, I went once more to the bookstore.įamiliar, then, was what I began to feel when I came upon the paperback Hue and Cry on the store’s shelf. The literary world beyond America was still a generally new one to me, still a feast of rich, though unfamiliar food, as it were. It was not that I had not been pleasantly, wonderfully nourished by such authors, but I had spent my teenage years in Washington, D.C., primarily devouring American writers, black and white. I had come to find something to read beyond the nineteenth-century British novels of the course I was taking. I first “met” James Alan McPherson in the College of the Holy Cross bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1969.

Hue and cry james alan mcpherson publish date