McAllister was born in
Baltimore,
Maryland in 1946. The son of a "peripatetic Navy family," his career-Navy-officer "
Pearl-Harbor-survivor father and an underdog-championing
anthropologist mother" raised Bruce and his younger brother, Jack, in Washington, D.C., Florida, California, and Italy. McAllister wrote, "The theme of the Outsider, the Other, the Alien in the larger sense, runs through almost all of my fiction. That came from being in a military family, from having a sense of being an outsider..." He wrote to
Dublin-based interviewer Bob Neilson, "When I was 4½ I shook hands with natty-dresser US President
Harry Truman on a laid-back avenue in
Key West, Florida. I had no idea who the guy was, but my momma raised me right. I wanted to be courteous, and he offered, so I shook his hand. ...[A] week after the hand-shake we dropped over to see
Mrs. Hemingway, who lived in a little
beach house with palms and banana trees and who, though we didn't know her, was hospitable." McAllister also told Neilson that "One of my ancestors was a guy named John Thomson. Immigrated from Scotland to Ireland, then the US in the 1700s. Wore his
kilt till the day he died, outlived five wives, had fifteen children. Maybe the right stuff for a frontier, a New World, but I've always been horrified by the thought of having to live with someone like him. The domestic, family side of
Braveheart?" The family story was that their lineage on his father's side went "back to
Robert the Bruce, supposedly, and laterally to
Ben Franklin, or so they said...along with a Captain McAllister of the
Confederate Army." McAllister also thought that his mother "was probably part
Native American." He taught literature and writing at the
University of Redlands in southern California for twenty-four years. There, he helped establish and direct the Creative Writing Program, directed both the Professional Writing track of that program and its Communications Internship program, received various teaching and service awards, and was Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of Literature and Writing from 1990 to 1995. Later, he started the company McAllister Coaching, helping writers of books and screenplays with their manuscripts. He lives in
Orange, California with his wife,
choreographer and
Orange Coast College teacher, Amelie Hunter. He has three children from a previous marriage: Annie, Ben, and Liz. ==Reception==