Donald Bruce Stewart

Donald Bruce Stewart was born June 15th, 1955, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He was the youngest of five children to Charles Alexander and Winifred Allen (McDonough) Stewart. Charles passed away when Donald was just two years old, leaving Winnie widowed with five young children. Winnie remarried, and the family moved around several times and lost a house to fire before settling in nearby Bound Brook, New Jersey.

Donald excelled in school but was prone to getting into mischief with his older siblings . Long-haired and outspoken at the peak of Vietnam-era counterculture, Donald was unpopular with the conservative school staff despite his academic success. Donald did not make this any easier on himself, needling the administration as editor of the student newspaper and playing bass in the provocatively named band Water Closet, which endeared itself to the staff with such antics as gathering 14 kazoos to serenade a student-president candidate with "Hail to the Chief."

As desperate to be rid of Bound Brook as it was to be rid of him, Donald graduated high school a year early as the top male student in the class, just shy of his 17th birthday, and enrolled at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He graduated with a degree in English in 1976.

Eager to pursue a lifelong love of reading and writing, Donald drove cross-country to Stanford University, where he graduated with an MFA in creative writing in 1977.

Donald worked odd job s in the San Francisco Bay Area to make ends meet while pursuing a career as a writer. His short stories were published in the Kansas Quarterly and other literary magazines. Unable to fully support himself with his writing, Donald found work as a technical writer for the oil equipment company Hydril in Houston.

When the oil industry collapsed in 1985, Donald was laid off from Hydril. Looking for something more stable than the boom-bust oil industry, Donald transitioned to a role in public relations at Whittier College near Los Angeles. He would continue to work at academic institutions for the rest of his career, returning to the greater Boston area to work for Wheaton College in 1988.

In 1989 at a Brandeis University alumni event, Donald met Karen Ann Engelbourg, a fellow alum working for the university in alumni relations. They wed the following January in a blizzard at the Brandeis faculty club as the university jazz band played on. Their first son, Michael Andrew Stewart, was born in December of that year.

Karen and Donald moved to Appleton, Wisconsin in 1992 for a brief stint at Lawrence University. Their second son, Ian Charles Stewart, was born there in September of 1994. Karen and Donald returned to Massachusetts in 1996 and settled in Needham, where they would remain for the next two decades.

With two young mouths to feed, Donald returned to school and received his MBA from Boston University in 1998. He transitioned into roles in university finance including at Harvard Medical School, Brown University, and Northeastern University, where he would retire in 2018.

After retirement, Donald continued to write, including several unpublished novels and short stories. He passed away on Friday, April 3rd, 2026, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston after a long illness.

He is survived by his wife Karen, his brother John, his two children, Michael and Ian, and his brother Lex’s family.

Honoring his wishes, services will be held privately.