WILLIAM di CANZIO, born on this date, is a playwright, whose plays — including the award-winning Dooley and Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier — have been staged in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Philadelphia; at Yale University and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center; and at the National Constitution Center.

He has taught literature, writing, and theater studies at Smith College, Haverford College, and Yale University. At Yale he was appointed dean of Trumbull College. He is currently associated with the Pennoni Honors College of Drexel University, where his work has been recognized with their award for outstanding teaching.

Di Canzio is the author of Alec, his first novel, a reimagining and continuation of E. M. Forster’s classic novel Maurice, told from the gamekeeper Alec Scudder’s perspective. Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec — a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge.

Di Canzio narrates Alec’s beginnings with his birth in Dorset in 1893. He recognizes early he’s attracted to men, having his first sexual experience with a male bodybuilder. He doesn’t have any shame about his homosexuality or make any excuses for it. He’s excellent at sports and exercises with weights to develop a handsome physique which gives him confidence to make his way in the world. Having left school, he has successive servant jobs eventually becoming gameskeeper at Penge where he meets Maurice.

Di Canzio quotes dialogue almost verbatim from Forster and ties the two books together (they easily could be read in tandem with each other), though we see the same courtship events from Alec’s perspective rather than Maurice’s.