McPherson won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his short story collection Elbow Room, becoming the first African-American to win the Pulitzer for fiction. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981. His work has appeared in 27 journals and magazines, seven short-story anthologies, and The Best American Essays. In 1995 McPherson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been educated at Morgan State University, Morris Brown College, Harvard Law School, The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and the Yale Law School. He has taught English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Harvard, Yale and also lectured in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University. He is now a professor in the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

In 2000, John Updike selected his short story "Gold Coast" for his collection Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin).

Story collections

• Hue and Cry (1968)
• Elbow Room (1977)

Other

• Crabcakes (memoir) (1998)
• A Region Not Home (essays) (2000)