Elbow Room.
James Alan
McPherson
's 1977 collection of twelve short stories,
Elbow Room
, won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1978. In his second collection of short stories, McPherson explores the search for, or in some cases the resistance to, psychological elbow room in twentieth-century America. For Virginia Valentine of
“Elbow Room”
, the ideal is
“a self as big as the world”
.For others, like the intrusive narrator of the same story, the goal is to discover fresh dimensions of stories and of selfhood. For still others, like the narrator of
“Story of a Scar”
, the point is to resist growth and human intimacy.
