Word: mckay
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...somewhat self-conscious being interviewed as a writer. "I only have two professions for two weeks in an interval of ten years," he claims. "In between everyone forgets about me." His new novel McKay's Bees is "a pretty well kept secret," he says...
Mild-mannered Thomas A. McMahon spends most of his time as McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics. But once every ten years or so, he ducks into a Pierce Hall phone booth, and emerges as Thomas McMahon, author...
Methods aside, McMahon draws on a more direct connection between his work as a professor and his writing. Gordon McKay, protagonist of McKay's Bees, is a familiar name in Harvard science departments. About 50 scientists, including almost the whole faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department, owe their livelihood to his very large endowment. McMahon, one of the flock, pays tribute with his novel--"90 per cent of the book is lies about Gordon McKay," he says, though the last chapter, in which McKay returns to Cambridge, makes a fortune in shoe manufacturing, and befriends several Harvard faculty members...
...McKay is not the only half-truth in the novel; Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor in the 1850s and the national biologist in a golden age of zoology, plays a small but acidulous part in the book. "I have been accused of character assassination," McMahon says, "but in fact his character is a lot worse than I said. He was famous for exploitation of the young people in the museum, for signing his name to their work. The accusations came so credibly and so often, that even his biographer concluded there is a lot of truth to them...
...McKay's Bees has perhaps a roomful of such figures--Henry David Thoreau comments on the biology of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz terrorizes his students and commits indiscretions with his housemaid. John Brown and his gang of Missouri border ruffians wage war on free-staters in Kansas. Even President Pierce gives an audience or two, once weeping, once belligerent...