Archives West Finding Aid

Alfred Borrello was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1931. He received his B.A. in English at St. John's University in 1952 and served in the U.S. Army from 1953-1955. After earning his M.A. at New York University in 1956, Borrello returned to St. John's where he graduated with a Ph.D. in English in 1965.

Borello's teaching career began at Mercer County Community College in Trenton, New Jersey. He was chairman of both the English department and the division of Liberal Arts at Mercer from 1967-1969. In 1969 Borrello moved to the Kingsborough College of the City University of New York as an associate professor of English.

Borrello's published works center around a small group of English novelists and poets. In 1969 he published " A Concordance of the Poetry in English of Gerard Manley Hopkins" with Scarecrow Press. They also published his dictionary on E.M. Forster a few years later. He wrote on the lives and literary accomplishments of such authors as H.G. Wells, Gabriel Fielding, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and for years he was associate editor of the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter. The research for Borrello's book on Gabriel Fielding brought him into close contact with Fielding and his family; the friendship, begun in 1967, grew into a long and affectionate relationship. Much of the correspondence between Borrello and the Fielding family was a lively dialog concerning the theological and moral aspects of Catholicism, a religion they shared. Borrello's passion for opera and the theatre is evidenced in the correspondence as well; there are hundreds of theatre programs and playbills in this collection dating from 1946.