 In 1972, McPherson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his short story collection "Elbow Room", becoming the first black writer to receive the program's Fiction Prize.He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, a member of the first group (21 recipients in all) ever selected for one of the MacArthur Foundation's so-called "genius grants."