He began his career as an English Professor at Providence College in September 1964, and continued graduate work at Brown University, earning the Ph.D. in the spring of 1970.
The election of George W. Bush to the U.S. Presidency in the fall of 2000, however, followed by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, drastically changed McCrorie's outlook, his whole political and literary orientation.
America, the poem makes clear, stresses not only military power, but the longing for political freedom and especially a fundamental fairness, the justice for which the nation has become famous.
Beatrice Beebe, whose work in New York City had explored mother-infant communication, and whose psychoanalytic practice had established her firmly in that field, was galvanized, like her husband, by the events of September 11.
In all his translations he persisted with the idea of close approximation: not only the sense but the sound of Homer's Greek he attempted to capture in English verse.
Generally Wilson will try to treat Germany fairly at the end of the war, however; indeed, McCrorie's principal aim in the story is to explore the question, How shall America send her best abroad?
On September 11, 2011, Beebe and other psychotherapists celebrated the tenth anniversary of their work with mothers and children who had lost their men in the World Trade Center attacks: they published, in the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, their 'Primary Prevention Project.'
Here was a work which warned of disaster for the Jews in the sixth century BCE and, in McCrorie's mind, portended extreme danger for his own people.
Among the many persons and sources McCrorie consulted, three women writers stood out: Gabrielle Walker, Elizabeth Kolbert and Adrian Klein explained past evidence and exposed present dangers in air and sea temperature, levels of carbon dioxide and the likely causes, including degradation by humans.
Advised by his grandson, Shayne Collins, now a graduate of University of California, Los Angeles, residing in North Hollywood and pursuing a film career, McCrorie tried adapting some narrative poetry for the screen.
Called Africa Dust, that work should be finished and looking for a publisher in 2017; if successful in that form, it should stand a better chance of pleasing a film producer in Los Angeles.