14 Facts About Alden Brooks

Alden Brooks was an American writer, chiefly remembered for his proposal that Sir Edward Dyer wrote the works of William Shakespeare.

Alden Brooks attended schools in France and England, before graduating from Harvard University in 1905.

Alden Brooks subsequently became for a time a tobacco farmer in southern Maryland, until he moved to France.

World War I broke out while Alden Brooks was in France, and he became an ambulance driver and subsequently a newspaper correspondent for The New York Times and Collier's.

Alden Brooks eventually took up duty as an ambulance driver for American troops on the front line.

Alden Brooks served with the French Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant of a field battery, after his petition for transfer to the American forces was turned down on the grounds of poor eyesight.

Alden Brooks saw action at Marne, Chemin-des-Dames, Chateau-Thierry and Meuse-Argonne, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with a silver star for gallantry while engaged in special missions in France on July 15 and 16,1918.

Alden Brooks deplored much of what he saw, including how General Robert Lee Bullard sent American troops to fight and die even though the Armistice was due to be declared in a few hours, and wrote of war's folly:.

Alden Brooks published his first book, The Fighting Men, in 1917.

Alden Brooks lived for a long period in France, and his home in Paris, Maison Alden Brooks built at 80 boulevard Arago in 1929, was designed by the architect Paul Nelson.

Alden Brooks's methodology consisted of specifying 54 criteria or qualifications which worked to the exclusion of the many false claimants the establishment of the true author's identity, only all of which his candidate, Sir Edward Dyer, was thought to meet in "concordance with the pattern".

Alden Brooks overcame the problem that Dyer died in 1607, several years before Shakespeare's The Tempest is believed to have been written, by arguing that this was early work, which he believed was proven by its appearance as the first play in the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays.

Alden Brooks married Hilma Chadwick, an artist, at St Ives, Cornwall, England, on 11 July 1908, and moved to France.

Alden Brooks has decisively influenced one recent independent researcher into the authorship heterodoxy.