Alden Brooks (1882–1964) was an American writer, chiefly remembered for his proposal that Sir Edward Dyer wrote the works of William Shakespeare. Early life Brooks was in born in 1882 in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended schools in both France and England, before graduating from Harvard University in 1905. Career Brooks taught at Harvard and as an instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy. He subsequently became for a time a tobacco farmer in southern Maryland, until he moved to France. World War I World War I broke out while Brooks was in France, and he became an ambulance driver and subsequently a newspaper correspondent for The New York Times and Collier's. He eventually took up duty as an ambulance driver for American troops on the front line. He was eager to join the A.E.F and thought the quickest way would be to study in a French artillery school. He served with the French Army and rose to the rank of lieutenant of a field battery, after his petition for transfer to the American forces was turned down on the grounds of poor eyesight. He saw action at Marne, Chemin-des-Dames, Chateau-Thierry and Meuse-Argonne, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with a silver star for gallantry while engaged in special missions in France on July 15 and 16, 1918. He deplored much of what he saw, including how General Robert Lee Bullard sent American troops to fight and die even though the Armistice was due to be declared in a few hours, and wrote of war's folly: War is stupid, insensate, unheroic to the last degree. War is not waged like a game. Analogies of the football field and of the chessboard are completely erroneous. War is a brutal chaos, governed by no laws. Brooks published his first book, The Fighting Men, in 1917. It consisted of a series of six short sketches depicting the respective psychological and behavioral traits of an ethnic group of soldiers, respectively English, Slav, American, French, Belgian and Prussian. Brooks lived for a long period in France, and his home in Paris, Maison Brooks built at 80 boulevard Arago in 1929, was designed by the architect Paul Nelson. His experiences of the war are recounted in his 1929 book Battle in 1918, As Seen by an American in the French Army, published in the United States as As I Saw It. Shakespeare authorship theories Aside from a