BOSSE, Malcolm (Joseph, Jr.) 1926-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 6, 1926, in Detroit, MI; died of esophageal cancer June 14, 2002, in New York, NY. Educator and author. Bosse was an author of books for both children and adults and was well known for his stories set in Asia, including The Warlord (1983). He got his first exposure to Asia after high school when he worked as a merchant marine, and then later, after earning his bachelor's degree at Yale University and working in New York City for two years as an editorial writer for Barron's Financial Weekly, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. Vietnam became the setting for his first novel, Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959). Returning home, Bosse earned his master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1960 and worked as a freelance writer. He continued his studies at New York University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1969. That same year, he began teaching English at the City College of the City University of New York, where he became a professor and eventually retired in 1992. Bosse began writing murder mysteries with his second novel, The Incident at Naha, and stories for young adults with 1979's The Seventy-nine Squares. Other young-adult books by Bosse include The Barracuda Gang (1982) and The Examination (1994). He also continued to write books for adults, such as the historical novels The Warlord (1983) and its sequel, Fire in Heaven (1986), and was coeditor of Foundations of the Novel (1974) and The Flowering of the Novel (1975). During his career, Bosse received considerable praise for both his adult and young-adult fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations in 1974 and 1975 for The Incident at Naha and The Man Who Loved Zoos respectively, a Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award in 1981, several honorable- and notable-book listings from the American Library Association, the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, and the Prix Lecture-Jeunesse.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, second edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Writers Directory, sixteenth edition, St. James Press,

2001.

PERIODICALS

New York Times, June 14, 2002, p. C11.