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    A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room"
    A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room"
    A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room"
    Ebook37 pages17 minutes

    A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535822480
    A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for James Alan McPherson's "Elbow Room" - Gale

      1

      Elbow Room

      James Alan McPherson

      1977

      Introduction

      James Alan McPherson's story Elbow Room explores race relations in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, soon after collapse of the rigid social standards that had been in place since the end of the Civil War, a century earlier. At the center of the story is a young couple: Virginia, a black woman whose travels across the world have opened her eyes to the ways in which American culture can be narrow-minded, and Paul, a white man who has opted out of the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector and is on his own personal search for truth. When they fall in love and marry, a friend of theirs, the story's narrator, predicts that they will find the challenges of being an interracial couple to be more than their youthful idealism has led them to expect. The biggest test comes from Paul's father, who rejects Virginia and the whole idea of the marriage, leading Paul to face life as an outsider. Throughout the telling of the story, McPherson weaves dialogues between the narrator and his editor. The editor, a cold and mechanical voice, insists that the story ought to contain a traditional narrative form and elements, but the narrator explains that the subject of race in the United States is too complex to be approached directly.

      This story is a part of a short story collection also called Elbow Room, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979.

      Author Biography

      James Alan McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943, and raised there. His background was lower-middle class, and he grew up at a time when Georgia's public schools were still segregated. He enrolled in Morgan State University in 1963 and earned his bachelor's degree from Morris Brown College in 1965. During the summers of his college years, he was a waiter in the dining cars of the Great Northern Railroad, an experience that allowed him to see what the world was like beyond the segregated South, influencing his sense of social justice and providing the breadth of experience from which he has drawn to craft his fiction.

      After college,

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