Alfred Robert McIntyre was born in the Boston suburb of Hyde Park, Massachussets. He was the only child of James William and Harriette Frances (Bradt) McIntyre. His father, a native of Boston, was a salesman for the publishing house of Little, Brown and Company. He became a member of the firm in 1897 and the effective head from 1908 until his death in 1913.
Alfred McIntyre attended Boston Latin School and Harvard and, upon graduation in 1907, went to work for Little, Brown, which had undergone a period of dramatic growth in the late nineteenth century.
By 1911, McIntyre was a partner, by 1913 vice-president and general manager, and in 1926 president. Over the next twenty-two years, he solidified the firm's already secure position as one of the country's leading trade houses. Under his leadership Little, Brown offered such notable books as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley (1937), the light verse of Ogden Nash, Walter Lippmann's An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (1937), and (in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press) Samuel Eliot Morison's Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942). McIntyre also saw to it that such Little, Brown staples as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations were periodically revised and promoted among new generations of readers. The business side of publishing attracted McIntyre as much as the literary. It was at his initiative that Little, Brown in 1925 entered an arrangement with the Atlantic Monthly Company whereby works which had originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly or were otherwise generated by its editors would be published by Little, Brown. Through this profitable arrangement, the company's list came to include such works as James Hilton's Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1934) and Walter D. Edmonds' Drums along the Mohawk (1936). During the depression and the vagaries of the World War II period, McIntyre drastically reduced the number of new titles issued a policy of prudent retrenchment he elevated to a rather lofty plane with the motto "Fewer and Better Books. "
McIntyre served as vice-president of the National Association of Book Publishers in 1921-1922 and again in 1925-1928. Boston book publishing has traditionally had a special social cachet, and Alfred McIntyre amply fulfilled this dimension of his position. He lived on Louisburg Square, within walking distance of Little, Brown's Beacon Street offices, and was a member of the Somerset, Union, and St. Botolph clubs. He was a noted host, and the formal banquet that marked Little, Brown's centennial in 1937, personally planned by McIntyre, was an event of social as well as commercial note. He died in 1948 of a subarachnoid hemorrhage following a period of nervous and physical exhaustion apparently brought on by overwork, and was buried at York Village, Maine.
McIntyre was politically a conservative.
A responsive editor who enjoyed personal friendships with a number of his authors, McIntyre was noted for his sustained faith in writers whose books he liked, even if the public did not at first agree. In several instances-notably with the British novelists Evelyn Waugh and C. S. Forester this practice eventually paid handsome returns. His strength as a businessman was his ability to make decisions quickly and to stand by them. In a trade where a genteel facade often masked brutal rivalries, McIntyre was genuinely and widely respected.
In appearance, he was slender, erect, and wiry, somewhat resembling an urbane Calvin Coolidge. The social side of McIntyre was always something of an effort for, unlike his hearty and gregarious father, he was painfully shy, as well as "high-strung and nervous of temperament".
Quotes from others about the person
"The best thing about McIntyre is you always know where to find him. He's a yes or no man, quick" - Ferris Greenslet
"Alfred McIntyre was so good that we should not have worn him out at sixty-two. " - Edward Weeks, editor of the Atlantic
McIntyre married on April 11, 1923, comparatively late in life, Helen Palmer Horner; they had two children: Henry Pierre and Ann Elizabeth.
