During my brief stay in Iowa City and teaching at the university there, I had several opportunities to spend time with the author James Alan McPherson. Once, when I happened to bump into him at a local bar, I felt that on this occasion maybe I could get a few more words from him than the usual hellos and goodbyes. No such luck. He was just as reticent in the bar, perhaps preferring to save his words for his essays and short stories. And what a treasury of literature flowed from him. McPherson, 72, died July 17, in Iowa City.

According to the Writers’ Workshop at the university, where I first met him, his death at a hospice resulted from complications of pneumonia.

Watching him cross campus, I got the impression that McPherson was always absorbed in deep thought, oblivious to the clamor around him, plotting the next short story. Some of those short stories were collected in “Elbow Room,” which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1978.

In “Brotherman—The Odyssey of Black Men in America,” which I edited with Robert Allen, we included portions of one of McPherson’s short stories, “Why I Like Country Music,” from the award-winning collection. Here the narrator relates to his wife a memory of a girl he knew in the fourth grade. “Now I must tell you this much more, dear Gloria: Whenever I smell fresh lemons, whether in the market or at home, I look around me—not for Gweneth Lawson, but for some quiet corner where I can revive in private certain memories of her. And in pursuing these memories across such lemony bridges, I rediscover that I loved her.”

McPherson, like the character, revived in private a trove of memories that were so well crafted as to leave an imperceptible line between fact and fiction.

Those lines that seemed to blend may have been the result of a cold reality he pursued all the way to a law degree at Harvard and the surrender to an inner muse who commanded he be literary and not lawyerly.

Born Sept. 16, 1943, in Savannah, Ga., McPherson was the son of an esteemed electrician and a maid. From his short stories, it is possible to gather fragments of his early days as viewed through an array of characters. But we know in fact that he attended Morris Brown College and Morgan State University, graduating from the former. While earning his bachelor’s degree, he worked as a janitor and as a dining car waiter on the Great Northern Railroad. That experience was to some extent reworked in his short story “On Trains,” which appears in his first collection, “Hue and Cry,” published in 1968. Another story from this collection, “God Coast,” was selected by John Updike for his “Best American Short Stories of Century,” published in 1999.

With an Updike inclusion and praise from a variety of noted authors, including Ralph Ellison, McPherson’s remarkable literary journey was signed and sealed.

It was further secured with the accumulation of awards—later he would add the Guggenheim and the MacArthur genius fellowship. Meanwhile, he settled in a professorial role, having earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was also the inaugural recipient of the Paul Engle Prize, named in honor of the workshop’s founder.

In 1995, McPherson, having taught widely before his long tenure at the University of Iowa, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, placing him alongside his mentor, Ellison.