William McPherson: The Rise and Fall of a Pulitzer Winner

The name William McPherson cropped up while I was doing research for my planned biography of journalist and war correspondent Wallace Terry, author of the classic 1984 book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. Terry mentioned McPherson in an interview he did with Eric James Schroeder for what became the 1992 collection Vietnam, We’ve All Been There.

Terry told Schroeder that McPherson, with whom he had worked on the Washington Post, had called him after the publication of a cover story about Black soldiers in Vietnam he had contributed to for Time magazine. An editor at the time for the William Morrow publishing house, McPherson had told Terry: “Wally, you should write a book for us about the black soldier.” Terry demurred at the time, explaining that he did not have enough material for a book.

Trying to discover more about McPherson’s life, I learned that the native of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, had enjoyed a distinguished journalism and writing career that included serving as the longtime editor of the Post’s “Book World” section, winning the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and producing the critically acclaimed novels Testing the Current (1984) and To the Sargasso Sea (1987). “I’ve cared about words since I was a kid,” he reflected. 

McPherson felt fortunate at being the editor of “Book World” because it allowed him to select only the books that he wanted to review. “Generally speaking,” he added, “I didn’t review books that didn’t interest me. There was no reason I should pan a first novel that nobody was going to hear about, for example.”

I was delighted to come across a remark made by one of his friends about McPherson, who attended the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and George Washington University without ever bothering to earn a degree. McPherson, noted his friend, “never allowed degree requirements to stand in the way of pursuing his own interests.” Those interests included a short stint as a merchant seaman (“one of my attempts to try on a new identity and escape the world around me”) before finding work in Washington, DC, as a copy boy at the Post, where he quickly rose up the ranks to become a staff writer and travel editor.

According to a story in his hometown newspaper, McPherson had received the news about winning his Pulitzer after returning home from a vacation. He saw a Post envelope pinned to his front door. “I thought I’d been fired when I saw the envelope was from Ben Bradlee [the newspaper’s editor] and figured he didn’t want me to come to work the next day and find out,” McPherson told a reporter.

Bradlee, however, had written on the outside of the envelope indicating that the note enclosed should be read while “sitting down with a drink and a smile.” When McPherson opened the envelope, the note read: “Damned if you didn’t win a Pulitzer.”

During his days editing "Book World," McPherson displayed a deft hand when editing what went into the section. He had a list of common-sense, cogent ideas about editing. They included: 

"The writer comes first.

The editor must remain in the background, insignificant.

Take enormous care, and never be cavalier with copy.

Don't inadvertently edit in mistakes.

The best editing is the least editing.

Change no more than has to be.

Ask: Is this a real improvement or just a change?

Above all, read carefully. What may seem amusing may only be flip; arguments should be sound: points made must be meaningful."

McPherson never had the inclination to write a novel, hoping to avoid adding “another tree to the pulp mill.” While walking to work at the Post one day between Christmas and New Year’s in 1977, however, he received, unbidden, at the corner of Eighteenth and Q Streets, a vivid mental image of a woman on a golf course on a summer morning taking a practice swing. 

“I saw the river in the distance, I saw the leaves on the trees, I saw the dew on the grass, every detail,” he told a Chicago Tribune reported in 2013. “And then it was as if the camera was panning back . . . and I realized that this was being seen by a kid sitting on the steps of the country club. It sounds weird, but there was something sacred about that moment, something luminous, so much so that I was kind of awed about it. It hit me with such intensity and clarity that I thought, ‘I have to write this down.’”

At home in his office that night he decided to write down what he had seen in his vision. The result: Twelve single-space pages that grew over the next five and a half years into his first novel (Testing the Current), told through the perspective a young boy named Tommy MacAllister, who returned as the subject (now forty years old) in McPherson’s second novel (To the Sargasso Sea).

McPherson left his editor’s position at “Book World,” joining the newspaper’s editorial page staff, selecting what letters to the editor to publish and writing the occasional column. He decided he did not want to edit “Book World” any longer because he had learned “how hard it was to write a book, and I didn’t want to criticize other books.”

At the age of fifty-three, McPherson, in 1987, accepted an offer of early retirement from the Post, believing he could make a living as a freelance writer (he remained on the newspaper’s medical plan). For several years, he explored Eastern Europe, frequently writing about the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.

McPherson’s pieces about his time overseas appeared in such publications as Granta, Slate, The Wilson Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. “It was truly a great adventure, it changed my life, and it was a lot more interesting than thinking about what it cost, which was a lot,” McPherson noted. “There’d always been enough money. I assumed there always would be. (I think this is called denial.)”

The uncertain and often poorly paid life of a freelancer, bad investments, bad luck, and bad health, including a major heart attack, led to McPherson finding himself sitting on a park bench with only a quarter in his pocket and nothing in the bank. “It’s a very lonely feeling,” he shared in a moving, well-regarded 2014 essay titled “Falling” for the academic journal Hedgehog Review. “It gives new meaning to the sense of loneliness and despair.”

McPherson wrote his essay not to evoke sympathy from his readers, realizing he had acted the same as those who had won the lotter and squandered their newfound wealth "on houses, cars, family, and Caribbean cruises. But I hadn't won the lottery; I'd fallen under the spell of magical thinking."

McPherson, who died on March 28, 2017, due to complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia, had wallowed in despair for a time at his unhappy situation. He decided, however, that he had two choices—to die in misery or to persevere. McPherson thought of the last two lines of John Milton’s poem “Lycidas”: “At last he rose, and twitch’s his mantle blue: / To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.” He got up from the park bench, grateful to his college English instructor for “teaching me to study ‘Lycidas’ seriously and realize what a great poem it is and what that matters.”