William McFee

Biography

He was born on the Erin's Isle, a three-masted ship owned by his father, a sea captain. Educated at Culford School, he became a mechanical engineer at Richard Moreland & Sons and W. Summerscales & Sons in the City, before going to sea as a marine engineer in 1906. He rose to chief engineer in ships of the Woodfield SS Co.; went to the United States in 1911 and wrote books, afterwards going to sea in ships of the United Fruit Company. During World War I he served in the Royal Navy as engineer in various transport ships. While in the navy he met Pauline Khondoff, a Bulgarian refugee. The couple wed in 1920, but divorced in 1932. He was married twice more, first to Beatrice Allender who died in 1952 and then to Dorothy North. After the war, he returned to the United States to live in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was with the United Fruit Company, as chief engineer until 1924 when he turned definitively to writing.

In addition to books, he also wrote reviews for The New York Sun and The New York Times. One of his reviews was for Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, in which he said, "In this book, with all its crudity of conception, its ruthless purloinings of technical tricks and its pathetic striving after philosophic profundity, there is the promise of a new and vigorous personality in fiction." Fitzgerald said that of all the negative reviews of her book, his "was at least intelligible."

He wrote several collections of reminiscences; his hobby was making ship models.

Works