McClellan was born in
Kobe,
Japan in 1925 to a Japanese mother, Teruko Yokobori and a British father who worked for
Lever Brothers in Japan. His mother and older brother died when he was two. Bilingual from birth and educated at the Canadian Academy in Kobe, McClellan and his father were repatriated to
Britain in 1942 aboard the
Tatsuta Maru, a passenger liner requisitioned by the
Imperial Japanese Navy to repatriate British nationals from throughout
Southeast Asia. In
London, McClellan taught Japanese at the
School of Oriental and African Studies as part of the war effort. At 18, he joined the
Royal Air Force, hoping to become a fighter pilot, but his fluency in Japanese made him more useful to Allied intelligence. He spent the years 1944–1947 in
Washington, D.C. and at Langley Air Force Base in Maryland, analyzing intercepted Japanese communications. In 1948, he went to the
University of St. Andrews, where he earned a degree in
British history and met his future wife, Rachel Elizabeth Pott. At St. Andrews he also met the noted political theorist
Russell Kirk, who took him on as his graduate student at
Michigan State University. Two years later, McClellan transferred to the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago to work with classicist David Grene and economist and philosopher
Friedrich von Hayek. McClellan appealed to Hayek to write his doctoral dissertation on the novelist
Natsume Sōseki, whose work was much admired in Japan but unknown in the West. To persuade Hayek of Sōseki's importance as a writer and interpreter of Japanese modernity, McClellan translated Sōseki's novel
Kokoro into English. McClellan's definitive translation of
Kokoro was published in 1957. Awarded his
doctorate in 1957, McClellan taught English at Chicago until 1959 when he was asked to create a program in Japanese studies, housed in the university's
Oriental Institute. He became full professor and founding chair of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 1965 and later was made the Carl Darling Buck Professor. In 1972, he moved to
Yale University and served as chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature 1973–1982 and 1988–1991. He was appointed as the Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies in 1979, the first chair at a U.S. university to be endowed by a Japanese sponsor. In 1999, McClellan was named a
Sterling Professor, Yale's highest professorial honor. McClellan was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1998 he was honored by the Japanese government with the
Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. His other major awards include the
Kikuchi Kan Prize (
菊池寛賞) for literature in 1994, the
Noma Prize for literary translation in 1995 and the Association for Asian Studies Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies in 2005. In addition to his committee work at Chicago and Yale, McClellan served on the board of the
Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), the American Advisory Committee of the
Japan Foundation, the
American Oriental Society, the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the editorial board of the
Journal of Japanese Studies and visiting committees in East Asian studies at
Harvard and
Princeton. His publications include translations of novels by Natsume Sōseki (in addition to
Kokoro,
Grass on the Wayside) and Shiga Naoya (''A Dark Night's Passing
); the translation of a memoir by Yoshikawa Eiji; a book of essays, Two Japanese Novelists: Soseki and Toson
; and a biography of 19th-century Japanese "bluestocking" Shibue Io, Woman in a Crested Kimono''. A festschrift published in his honor by the
University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, notes: "Among McClellan's students his seminars have become lore. ... The depth and breadth of readings these seminars required were a revolution in pedagogy when McClellan first began them over 20 years ago; and they continue to represent an ideal of graduate training in the field. ... He taught his students to ask the most fundamental questions about the literary imagination: how language functions within the history of literary forms and in the context of society, history, politics and the existential yearnings of a singular imagination." McClellan remained a British citizen until his death. His wife, Rachel, died in January 2009. ==
Festschrift==