McAleer, John J(oseph) 1923-2003

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McALEER, John J(oseph) 1923-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 29, 1923, in Cambridge, MA; died of cancer, November 19, 2003, in Lexington, MA. Educator and author. A longtime professor at Boston College, McAleer was the author of both fiction and scholarly nonfiction books. After serving in the U.S. Army in both North Africa and India during World War II, he earned a master's degree at Boston College in 1949 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1955. His teaching career, however, had already started by this time at Boston College, where he had been working as an instructor since 1948. Except for a five-year break while he worked on his doctorate, McAleer continued to work at Boston College throughout his academic career, becoming a full professor of English in 1965. He first became a published book author with the scholarly 1962 title Ballads and Songs Loyal to the Hanoverian Succession (1962). After this, McAleer published other scholarly works and two pieces of fiction: Unit Pride (1981), which was based on the actual Korean War experiences of Billy Dickson, and the mystery novel Coign of Vantage; or, The Boston Athenaeum Murders (1998). Interested in transcendental philosophy after having met Mahatma Gandhi in India during the war, McAleer published Artist and Citizen Thoreau (1971) and Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (1983); he was also interested in the author Rex Stout, having written a biography of Stout, coauthored The Work of Rex Stout (1996), and edited Stout's Justice Ends at Home, and Other Stories (1977).