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Up for sale "American Playwright" William Alfred Hand Signed Book Plate.
ES-3771D
William Alfred (August
16, 1922 – May 20, 1999) was an American playwright, poet, and professor of English literature at Harvard University. Alfred
was born into an Irish family in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a bricklayer and his
mother was a telephone operator. He graduated from St. Francis Preparatory
School in 1940. Alfred
was drafted in 1943, two years into his undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College. He served in the Army tank corps and quartermaster's corp in World War II for four years. While in the army, he was
taught Bulgarian at a language school and then stationed in the South Pacific,
where he wrote poems for American Poet. Alfred completed his B.A. from
Brooklyn College in 1948 with the help of the G.I. Bill. Alfred is a double
graduate of Harvard University, where he specialized in the literature of
Medieval England, receiving his A.M. and Ph.D. in
English in 1949 and 1954 respectively. While at Harvard, Alfred took a creative
writing course under Archibald MacLeish, where
he wrote his play, Agamemnon. He
began teaching at Harvard the same year he received his doctorate and was
appointed full professor in 1963. In 1980, he was named Abbott
Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities. He retired in 1991
