John J. McAleer was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 29, 1923 to Stephen Ambrose McAleer and Helen (Collins) McAleer. He received his bachelor's degree from Boston College in 1945 after taking time off mid-degree to serve in the Army in China, Burma, and India during World War II. He worked briefly in politics on the first John F. Kennedy campaign before returning to Boston College for his master’s degree in 1947. He went on to earn a doctorate in English from Harvard in 1955. He received his first faculty position at Boston College that same year. He taught there, in both the English department and in the Woods College, for the next forty-eight years. He married his wife Ruth (Delaney) McAleer in December 1957, and the two had six children: Mary Alycia, Sarah, Seana, John, Paul, and Andrew.
McAleer was best known for his scholarship on mystery authors and taught a popular series of courses on the art of detective fiction, but his interests were eclectic. Among his published works were biographies of Henry David Thoreau (Artist and Citizen Thoreau, 1971), Ralph Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, 1984), and novelist Rex Stout (Rex Stout: A Biography, 1977), the latter of which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award; an introduction to the works of novelist Theodore Dreiser (Theodore Dreiser: An Introduction and Interpretation, 1968); an edited edition of eighteenth-century songs (Ballads and Songs Loyal to the Hanoverian Succession, 1962); a much-lauded biographical novel of a soldier in the Korean War (Unit Pride, 1981); and a crime novel about a Boston-based biographer caught up in a series of high-society murders (Coign of Vantage, 1988).
John McAleer died on November 19, 2003.
