Alan Heuser was born in Montreal in 1926 and died in Vancouver, February 26, 2003. He graduated from McGill with a BSc "great distinction" in 1947. Inspired by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, he did an MA in English at McGill on Hopkins and went on to Harvard where he did a PhD in English, writing a doctoral dissertation on aesthetic cognition in Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his student days at McGill, Alan Heuser was the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the Moyse Travelling Scholarship and the Delta Epsilon Scholarship.
Alan Heuser taught at Princeton from 1952-1954. He returned to McGill in 1954 where he taught in the English Department for the next thirty-eight years, retiring as professor in 1992.
Professor Heuser published his work on Hopkins in The Shaping Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford 1958; New York 1968), and then turned his interest to the Irish poet Louis MacNiece. In 1987, he published Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNiece (Oxford: Clarendon) and followed that work with The Selected Prose of Louis MacNiece (Oxford: Clarendon 1990). In addition, Professor Heuser published articles, reviews and poems in such literary reviews as Sewanee, Encounter, and the Antigonish Review.
Alan Heuser is survived by his two beloved children, Liesel and John, and his grand-daughters, Emma, Zoe and Ruby.
There will be a memorial mass for Alan Heuser on Saturday, March 22 at 11 am at the McGill Newman Centre Chapel, 3484 Peel.
