Early Life

Alfred's first nine years were spent in Manhattan. The family lived on East 76th Street in a two-room apartment over a barbershop. His parents were poor working-class people. Alfred's father, Thomas Richard, was a bricklayer; his mother, Mary, a telephone operator. His great-grandmother, Anna Maria, who lived in Brooklyn, took care of him while his parents worked. At four and a half, he was sent to boarding school because, by then, Alfred's great-grandmother was nearly blind. "I was a boarder at St. Anne's Academy on Seventy-sixth Street, a Marist Brothers school, from the age of four and a half until six. It was like a prison ... a children's Devil's Island." At age six Alfred developed scarlet fever, then diphtheria, and nearly died. By the time he was sixteen he had suffered the first of several heart attacks. By age fifty-eight, he had had six.

In 1931, as the Depression took hold, Thomas, Mary, and William Alfred moved to Brooklyn, and Alfred attended a Catholic school that was not only cheaper, at ten cents a month, but where "the nuns were an absolute delight." From fourteen to eighteen, Alfred went to St. Francis Preparatory School, run by the Franciscan Brothers on Baltic Street in Brooklyn, and graduated with the Class of 1940. He then attended Brooklyn College, "where a whole new world opened up … all the commonplaces of my life were smashed." Up to that point, Alfred had only attended parochial schools with other Irish-Americans like himself. Brooklyn College was a refreshing change, "very invigorating ... a wonderful discovery.” Alfred admitted that it was his classes at Brooklyn College --James Meagher's English Literature class, Harry Slochower's German class, Don Marion Wolfe's class on Milton --that set him on the road to teaching. "They were professors who believed in literature as deeply as religious men believe in God. They had the gift St. Thomas said is the first attribute of a teacher - love.”

World War II interrupted William Alfred's education. He was drafted into the army. "Three years, three months - you remember it the way you remember a prison sentence.” Alfred was placed in the Army Tank Corps Division. "I couldn't even drive a car ... I was always throwing out the bearings ... until, finally, they said 'You. Out.' Then I was put into language training." The army sent Alfred to Regis College Language School in Denver where he chose to learn Bulgarian (mastering it in three months). Alfred was then stationed in the South Pacific in the Quartermaster Corps where he spent the remainder of the war. It was in the army that Alfred began to write plays in earnest. Upon returning from the war, Alfred finished his undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College.

Harvard

Alfred attended Harvard on the G.I. bill, receiving his Master's degree in English in 1949, and his Ph.D in Philosophy in 1954. Upon completion of his doctoral studies, William Alfred became part of Harvard University's faculty and was made full professor in 1963. This is where Alfred would spend the rest of his adult life -- teaching, writing, making lifelong associations with colleagues, and mentoring multitudes of students. Alfred would become one of Harvard's most beloved professors, a campus legend. In time, he was named the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities, a position he held until his retirement in 1991, after which he continued to tutor one undergraduate student per semester. Alfred would always view Harvard as a "village, albeit a glamorous one."

During his long years of association with Harvard University, Alfred developed close relationships with colleagues such as Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Mason Hammond, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, and many others. However, Alfred also made friends outside of his coterie at Harvard. He developed a close relationship and corresponded frequently with Robert Lowell, Lillian Hellman, Lillian Ross, and Faye Dunaway.

As a student, Alfred had taken a creative writing course with MacLeish, and wrote Agamemnon, a modern-day version of the Aeschylus tragedy, published in 1954. His most famous play, Hogan's Goat, was begun in 1956 while he was living in London on the money he had been awarded for the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship. Alfred, when queried as to why he preferred to write plays, admitted that he " ... didn't have the patience to write novels ... verse is an easy measure to build up a scene with.” He said verse drama "provided a sense of heightened tempo ... I had more control of timing." Alfred's in-depth research was obvious in his plays. Archibald MacLeish advised him that "the fellow who wants his play to stand up in front of all types of audiences everywhere must take the time and the patience to do a complete file on every character he intends to use."

Alfred began as a medievalist scholar at Harvard and went on to teach English Literature, drama, poetry, and screenwriting. His class on Beowulf was legendary. Alfred was known to generations of students simply as professor. Not only was he an excellent educator but he mentored an untold number of students. He had the ability to develop a special rapport with each and every one. "Alfred befriended more Harvard undergraduates than any teacher in the school's history," said Robert Brustein, director of The American Repertory Theatre at Yale.

Professional Legacy

Since William Alfred never married, he became the quintessential bachelor, a man surrounded by his books, his photographs, and his collection of clocks. His main avocation was repairing clocks and he took enormous delight in it. An even more important pastime was greeting friends, colleagues, and students. His home at thirty-one Athens Street was always open to his students, his proteges, and his friends. Alfred had a special gift for storytelling much like his great-grandmother, and had an anecdote for nearly every situation.

During his years at Harvard, he received hundreds of letters from his students requesting recommendations; boxloads of manuscripts, plays, poems, and novels from students asking for critiques and innumerable letters beseeching his counsel. Alfred savored it all. He loved working with students, whether in his classroom or one-on-one. These encounters invigorated him. He grew animated during discussions with both friends and students. When asked how he went about advising young writers, Alfred's response was simple: "Fine writers, those who put so much of themselves into their work, are naturally sensitive. I have to get to them jocosely (jokingly). I devise a means of getting my point across by parodying their own work." His advice, "... save some portion of the day to do something you want to do... save an hour to write, just to get into the habit of writing ... do something that has nothing to do with studying so that you have a sense of your own freedom. I used to go for a walk down to Central Square."

Alfred understood that writing was not a solitary endeavor. “Robert Lowell, Lillian Hellman ... we read to each other, and we read each others things ... we weren't imitators, but we used the various tools." As a young man, Alfred wrote repeatedly to Gertrude Stein and one day she responded with "happy are those who read, and happy are those who write, but the happiest are those who both read and write." When she died, Alfred gave all the letters he had received from Gertrude Stein to Brooklyn College for preservation.

In letters that Alfred received from his former students, he is highly praised for his kindness, his advice, his wise counseling and his inspiration. Those who continued to keep in touch with William Alfred feel very deeply about him. They speak of his kind and comforting demeanor, his generosity of spirit that made him easy to approach. They recount how fortunate and grateful they are to have had him as professor. In fact, as the years passed, quite a number of his former students' children (and even their grandchildren) were guided into Professor Alfred's classes. Not only was he a great storyteller, he was a wonderful listener. Some of his students went on to become famous performers such as Susan Stockard Channing, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kathryn Walker.

Faye Dunaway, whom he first met in September 1964, held a special place in his heart. When trying out for his play Hogan's Goat, "she walked into the audition wearing a white leather suit, beautiful auburn hair down to her hips ... as though the goddess Aphrodite had appeared in the rehearsal hall she was hypnotic. She was one of the best readers of a play. She knew where to pause ... had perfect pitch, like a musician." Alfred felt that she embodied the very best in an actor because she had the ability to convey a sense of reality. When Hogan's Goat finally opened on Broadway in 1965 (because of the demands of his teaching career, it took Alfred nine years to finish the play), it starred Faye Dunaway and Ralph Waite. It was a resounding success and Dunaway became an overnight sensation. In January 1982 she performed once again in another of Alfred's plays, The Curse of an Aching Heart, Dunaway and Alfred became the best of friends, corresponding with one another right up to his death.

Irish-American Roots

William Alfred was not only a professor who read and spoke Old and Middle English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, and French, but an acclaimed playwright, poet, and scholar who wrote extensively about his Irish-American roots. These Irish roots played a significant role in his creative life and inspired most of his plays, from Hogan's Goat and Cry For Us All (a musical version of Hogan's Goat) to The Curse of an Aching Heart, all of which were performed on Broadway. In addition to his plays, Alfred authored a book of poems, The Annunciation Rosary, wrote the verse-drama Agamemnon, the poems Elegy in the Harvard Yard and Elegy on the Brooklyn Campus, and translated Beowulf. He contributed to the American Poet, The Hudson Review, The Commonweal, and other publications.

Alfred's great-grandmother, Anna Maria Gavin Egan, was born in Castlebar, Mayo, Ireland, about 1848, and immigrated to America in 1866. She was a dominant influence in his life and helped raise him. Alfred always felt as if he was " ... a child of the nineteenth century." It was her stories he incorporated into his plays, her life in Ireland, the people she knew at the turn of the century in America. "The people she had known and associated with seemed more alive, even though they were dead, than the people around me. She intrigued me with her stories. One particular tale became the seed for Hogan's Goat. It is mostly her memories I retell, although I cannot rightly say where her memories leave off and my embroidering of them begins." In The Curse of an Aching Heart, Alfred based his main character on of his great-grandmother's Brooklyn neighbors, a woman who had been jilted three times. After each break-up, the young lady stepped onto her front porch and screamed, "Oh, the curse of an aching heart!"

Anna Maria herself had been a sickly child and was sent to the seashore to live with her own grandmother. Once married with four children of her own, Anna Maria sent one of her own children, Agnes, to be raised by her mother since one of her other children was frail and required all her attention. Agnes married Stanislaus Bunyan, but she died at twenty, probably of tuberculosis, six months after giving birth to Mary (Alfred's mother). Her husband, Stanislaus, returned to Dublin and died leaving Anna Maria to raise her granddaughter, Mary (Bunyan) Alfred, and her great-grandson, William Alfred. "She played the same role for me [that] she had in my mother's life."

Growing up in Brooklyn was not easy for Alfred. His parents often fought. The other children made fun of him because of his heavy Irish brogue. Alfred was a quiet child who enjoyed playing practical jokes. He loved disguising his voice on the telephone. But his greatest joy growing up, he later admitted, was going to the movies and to the theater. These gave him his most pleasurable moments and memories.

Alfred's most famous play, Hogan's Goat, describes the lives of Irish-American immigrants in the City of Brooklyn in 1890. The play's focus is on the personal life of Matthew Stanton, the dynamic immigrant Irish leader of Brooklyn's Sixth Ward, a personable and promising young man who wants to unseat the incumbent corrupt Mayor of Brooklyn, Ned Quinn. But, Stanton's wife, Kathleen, is appalled because she is worried the publicity will reveal that she and Matt were never married in the eyes of the Church, something that has always troubled her. Mayor Quinn will not be deterred and threatens to reveal not only the Stantons' civil marriage ceremony, but also that Stanton had once been the 'kept man' (goat) of Agnes Hogan, the powerful ex-girlfriend of Quinn, and now a dying woman. In the end, it is Mayor Quinn who gains the upper hand by divulging that Stanton is a bigamist, and Stanton, because of his ambition and determination, destroys not only himself but the two most important women in his life. Hogan's Goat can best be viewed as the story of a man fired by a ruthless ambition that was born in poverty. "What happened to me in that dreadful landing ship," says Matt, recalling his arrival in America, "must never happen to me again as long as I live. I'll see to it, even if I must push everyone out of my way."

In Alfred's reminiscences, he acknowledged that Hogan's Goat was drawn from the peculiar marital circumstances of his own parents. His father had been married once before and had fathered two sons (Alfred met his two half-brothers in his twenties). Although Thomas Alfred had divorced his first wife, the Church did not recognize this. In the eyes of the Church his parents were not married. Therefore, the situation between Matt and Kate Stanton is similar to that of Thomas and Mary Alfred.

Hogan's Goat became more than just a tale about a way of life of Irish-Americans at the turn of the century. It was an embodiment of a people, the memoirs of the young Irish who lived in and around the Gowanus in Brooklyn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Alfred said: "Each block was a village and there was a deep sense of community ... a sense of trust ... people talked to one another without being guarded. I believe drama is rooted in one particular region. The characters in Hogan’s Goat are composites of people my great-grandmother knew. It is about the people who frequented Bond Street, Smith Street, those who went to school at St. Agnes, St. Anne's or St. Francis Preparatory and attended St. Paul's or St. Charles Church." Alfred's writings clearly describe a way of life long gone but not forgotten. He wrote of the emotion, the fear, the hate, but also about the simplicity and complexity of it all.

Hogan's Goat garnered rave reviews. Critics heralded Alfred's "command of the English language ... vigorous, exciting, explosive ... not all Irish are poets or word-painters, but Alfred's cadences, phrases ... fascinating," wrote Whitney Bolton in The Morning Telegraph, December 13, 1965. Life Magazine declared it "the best American play of the year." Another reviewer referred to the play as a "simple straightforward attempt to write a modern-day verse tragedy." Walter Kerr, in The New York Herald Tribune, described it as a play that “ … takes the lace-curtain Irish parochialisms of Brooklyn, before the turn of the century, translates them into cynical political terms, and then lifts the whole sad, sorry combination into the rhythms of highly charged verse ... verse with a sting in its tail."

Awards and Prizes

Alfred won the Drama Desk's Vernon Rice Award from the New York critics and the Religious Drama Award of the National Catholic Theater Conference for this play. When queried about the play's success, Alfred admitted: "The nicest thing about a professor in the theater is that you can always Alfred was acclaimed both in academia and in the theater, he often had misgivings about dividing his time between the two. "I feel a kind of dual guilt ... since the nature of my professional life does not leave me enough time for either."

Alfred won awards and prizes for his poetry. He received the Atlantic Monthly College Poetry Prize in 1947, the Harvard Monthly Poetry Prize in 1951, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship Award in 1956. He also was accorded the National Catholic Dramatic Conference Award and the Brooklyn College Literary Association Award. Alfred served on the poetry panels of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Committees. He was a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the Dramatists Guild, the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and the Athens Street Company. He received the National Institute of Arts & Letters grant and the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in 1959. He was assistant and associate editor for the American Poet from 1942-44. He co-edited the Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1953).

In 1993 the Harvard Alumni Association awarded William Alfred the Harvard medal for "faithful and distinguished service to the university." Alfred was addressed as the "beloved bard from Brooklyn, kindly counselor, and professor of early English theatre of the heart and poetry of the soul."

Generosity of Spirit

There is, however, something few knew about Alfred. Although generous to a fault with those whom he knew and loved, he also helped the dispossessed, the homeless, and the incarcerated. When someone came knocking on his door for a handout, he graciously asked them how their day had been and whether they would like a cup of tea. Alfred reached into a cookie jar he kept near the door and gave each a dollar or two. He never refused a person in need.

Calm and soft-spoken by nature, unpretentious and sincerely devout, William Alfred epitomized a man who was modesty itself. Alfred was a familiar figure on his daily walks in Cambridge's Putnam Square, and easily recognizable in his crushed hat, somewhat rumpled suit, and, more often than not, with a book in his pocket. He looked (and acted) very much like a man from the turn of the twentieth century.

An accomplished poet and playwright, an acclaimed professor, arecognized scholar, Alfred maintained that he was happy writing and teaching. He enjoyed imparting knowledge to his students, was elated when any one of them published, and reveled in their successes.