He received his Bachelor of Arts from Wheaton College (Illinois) in 1912 and his master's from the University of Chicago in 1913.
[1] He worked for twenty years at the Yale Observatory in South Africa before returning to the University of Virginia.
In 1951 he was the vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and chairman of its section D (astronomy).
Then, from 1952 to 1955 he was the president of Commission 24, the Stellar Parallaxes section, of the International Astronomical Union.,[1] Alden retired from the University of Virginia on June 30, 1960.
He died in Charlottesville on February 3, 1964, and was survived by his wife, Mildred, by three children and by eleven grandchildren.