Sterling Allen Brown

Brown, Sterling A. (1901–1989), poet, critic, and anthologist. Sterling Allen Brown was born on 1 May 1901 into what some have called the “smug” or even “affected” respectability of Washington's African American middle class. He grew up in the Washington world of racial segregation, which engendered a contradiction between full citizenship and marginalized existence. The son of a distinguished pastor and theologian, Brown graduated with honors from the prestigious Dunbar High School in 1918. That fall, he entered Williams College on a scholarship set aside for minority students. By the time he left in 1922, he had performed spectacularly: election to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, the Graves Prize for his essay “The Comic Spirit in Shakespeare and Molière”, the only student awarded “Final Honors” in English, and cum laude graduation with an AB degree.

At Harvard University from 1922 to 1923, Brown took an MA degree in English. In retrospect, he always talked about his fortuitous discovery of Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry (1921). This anthology, more than any other single work he read, radically altered his view of art by introducing him to the New American Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and other experimenters in melding vernacular language, democratic values, and “the extraordinary in ordinary life.” When he left, however, he left knowing what the illustrator of Southern Road (1932) would later observe about him: “Harvard only gave you the way to put it down, not how to feel about things.”

The sensitivity to the philosophical and poetic potential in African American folk life, lore, and language was developed in Brown during a series of teaching assignments in Negro colleges, including Virginia Seminary and College (1923–1926), Lincoln University in Missouri (1926–1928), and Fisk University (1928–1929). In each of these locations, he set about absorbing the cultural and aesthetic influences that would define the folk-based metaphysic of his art. On numerous “folklore collecting trips” into “jook-joints,” barbershops, and isolated farms, Brown absorbed the wit and wisdom of Mrs. Bibby, Calvin “Big Boy” Davis, Slim Greer, and many more actual persons who are refashioned into the many memorable folk characters of his poetry.

The poetry collected into Southern Road challenges James Weldon Johnson's dictum that the poetic and philosophical range of Black speech and dialect is limited to pathos and humor. Although the minstrel and plantation traditions had heavily burdened African American speech with the yoke of racial stereotypes, Brown, along with Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, admirably demonstrated the aesthetic potential of that speech when it is centered in careful study of the folk themselves. Brown came to this conclusion, as he said in a 1942 speech, when he discovered the way folklore became a lens through which to view African American vernacular language. Taking the approach of a creative writer to folklore, he said: “I was first attracted by certain qualities that I thought the speech of the people had, and I wanted to get for my own writing a flavor, a color, a pungency of speech. Then later, I came to something more important—I wanted to get an understanding of people, to acquire an accuracy in the portrayal of their lives.”

Brown, found support for his vision of “folk” in the work of Benjamin A. Botkin, whose term “folk-say” suggested a profound shift in folklore studies that Brown knew and approved of. Folklore, as Botkin pointed out, was something more than collecting, verifying, indexing, and annotating sources; it was people talking, doing, and describing themselves. To underscore this new emphasis, Botkin published a series of regional miscellanies under the name Folk-Say beginning in 1929. Brown contributed eighteen poems and two essays to editions two through four of Folk-Say.

The success of Brown's “theory” of folklore is revealed in its implementation. Brown's poetry received its motivation from a need to reveal the humanity that lies below the surface racial stereotypes only skim. There he found qualities erased by racial stereotype: “tonic shrewdness, the ability to take it, and the double-edged humor built up of irony and shrewd observation.” Structurally, he made use of, as he said, “the clipped line, the blues form, and the refrain poem.” Those folk forms were complemented by his astute experiments with traditional forms, such as the sonnet, villanelle, and ballad. Brown's frequent allusions to Black folk heroes such as John Henry, Stackolee, and Casey Jones also raised ordinary experience to mythic proportions.

Recently, literary historians have acknowledged the persistence of Brown's folk-based aesthetic in his critical and editorial work, too. But despite its coherence, his approach has received little study. Beginning in 1931–1932, when he returned to Harvard for doctoral study, Brown focused his critical writing on examinations of representational issues. The result was “Plays of the Irish Character: A Study in Reinterpretation” (an unpublished 1932 course thesis), “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” (1933), The Negro in American Fiction (1937), and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). The connecting link in Brown's editorial and research work for the Federal Writers’ Project, the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, and The Negro Caravan (1941), the most comprehensive literary anthology of Black writing of its time, is also his folk-based aesthetic. Collectively, this work points to Brown's need to demonstrate the diversity as well as the complexity of African American life. Against the conclusion of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) that Black life was a “distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American condition,” Brown presented evidence that African American folk humor functioned as a strategy for exerting control in an often hostile world. Or when the specious argument was made accusing African Americans of having contributed very little to American literature, Brown, with coeditors Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, presented The Negro Caravan as irrefutable proof of Black literary achievement.

Brown also attempted to correct the myopic lens used to view African Americans by writing a number of prose sketches that were to be collected and published as “‘A Negro Looks at the South”. These pieces included “Out of Their Mouths”, “Words on a Bus”, “The Muted South”, and several more. The shared reference to speech tells us much about Brown's view of language as a vehicle for determining cultural authenticity. That Brown admits to viewing these pieces as poems reveals more about his aesthetic, too. Each dialogue or conversation was a unit of speech and thus needed as he said, “counterpoint, cadence, rhyming, timing, etc. for impact and truth.” Therefore, if cuts had to be made, whole units of dialogue should be cut, not cuts within the unit.

The careful reconsideration of Black speech as a viable medium of artistic expression became for Brown the predominant means for reclaiming the humanity of African Americans. This pursuit, of course, had social implications. Brown and others shared the view that “art is a handmaiden to social policy.” Although a staunch believer in the promises of the Constitution, Brown was aware that such provisions as the infamous “three-fifths compromise” began a lengthy list of stumbling blocks to achieving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream meant for Brown the addition of two-fifths more, making a whole number. The root word in “integration” is “integer,” which means “whole or complete.” As literary historians and cultural critics reexamine the value of the vernacular in their respective pursuits, Brown's daring efforts to make Black folk speech claim a rightful place for him and his people will be properly acknowledged.

Bibliography

• Sterling A. Brown, “A Son's Return: ‘Oh, Didn’t He Ramble,’” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, eds. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto, 1979, pp. 3–22.
• Robert G. O’Meally, “An Annotated Bibliography of the Works of Sterling A. Brown,” in The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper, 1980.
• Kimberly W. Benston, “Sterling Brown's After-Song,” Callaloo 14, 15; 5.1, 5.2 (1982): 33–42.
• Joanne V. Gabbin, Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, 1985.
• Robert B. Stepto, “Sterling A. Brown: Outsider in the Harlem Renaissance?” in The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, eds. Amritjit Singh et al., 1989, pp. 73–81.
• Mark A. Sanders, “Distilled Metaphysics: The Dynamics of Voice and Vision in the Poetry of Sterling A. John Brown,” PhD diss., Brown University, 1992.
• John Edgar Tidwell, “Recasting Negro Life History: Sterling A. Brown and the Federal Writers’ Project,” Langston Hughes Review 12.2 (Summer/Winter 1995): 77–82.
• John Edgar Tidwell, “‘The Summer of ‘46’: Sterling A. Brown among the Minnesotans,” Black Heartland 1.1 (1996): 27–41

John Edgar Tidwell

writer; folklorist; educator

Personal Information

Born Sterling Allen Brown, May 1, 1901, in Washington, DC; son of Sterling Nelson (a pastor) and Adelaide Allen Brown; married Daisy Turnbull, 1927; children: John L. Dennis (adopted).
Education: Williams College, B.A., 1922; Harvard University, M.A., 1923; Howard University, doctoral study, beginning c. 1931.

Career

Began writing poetry, early 1920s; taught English at Virginia Seminary and College, beginning c. 1923; taught at Lincoln University, 1926-28; taught at Fisk University, 1928-29; taught at Howard University, 1929-69; published volume of poems Southern Road, 1932; published books The Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama, 1937; assisted in compilation and editing of collection Negro Caravan, 1941; assisted in compilation of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, 1944; visiting professor at University of Minnesota, 1945, New York University, 1949-50, and University of Illinois, 1967-68; published volume of poetry The Last Ride of Wild Bill, 1975.

Life's Work

Though he has often been called a writer of the Harlem Renaissance--a period of cultural development among U.S. blacks, centered in New York City's Harlem in the 1920s--poet and literary critic Sterling Brown rose to prominence during the early 1930s outside of New York's literary and intellectual circles. Other black writers and poets of the period sought inspiration from urban life and the exotic atmosphere of Harlem cabarets, whereas Brown embarked on a firsthand study of Southern blacks.

A graduate of the prestigious universities Williams and Harvard, Brown observed black dialect, music, and folktales with brilliant insight, attaining knowledge that emerged in a powerful poetic voice filled with rhythm and imagery cultivated from black oral and blues traditions. His critical works on black literature and drama published in the 1930s were the first in-depth studies of their kind, and they, like Brown's poetry of the same period, are among the most outstanding works by an African American writer during the Depression era.

The youngest of six children, Sterling Allen Brown was born on May 1, 1901, on the campus of Howard University, in Washington, DC. A Howard professor of religion and pastor of the Lincoln Temple Congregational Church, Brown's father, Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown, instilled in his son a sense of achievement and moral refinement. His stories of slavery in Tennessee and his subsequent struggle for a college education fueled his son's imagination. Brown's father was, as Arthur Fauset wrote in Sterling Brown: A UMUM Tribute, "characteristic of the race 'men' of his era. That indomitable drive to achieve, that quality of integrity and erudition possessed by him and his wife, were moulded into the character of their only son."

Raised on the Howard campus, near a section of the city known as "Foggy Bottom," Brown lived with his family on 11th Street, above the Lincoln Congregational Church. His contact with white youths was limited to a friendship with a boy whose father owned a nearby drugstore. In the rich intellectual environment of Howard, he met such noted black scholars as W. E. B. Du Bois and Howard professor of philosophy Alain Locke. At Dunbar High school, an institution noted for its prestigious instructors and graduates, Brown attended classes taught by abolitionist Frederick Douglass's grandson Haley Douglass and Jessie Redmon Fauset, the novelist and founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At home, he received instruction in literature from his mother, Adelaide, a Fisk University graduate whose inspired reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Paul Lawrence Dunbar had a profound impact on Brown's later career as a writer and literary scholar.

In 1918, at the age of 17, Brown received an academic scholarship and entered Williams College. Williams was segregated, so Brown spent most of his time with a small coterie of black students. He served on the debate team and played for the Common Club Tennis Team. Through the tutelage of instructor George Dutton, Brown discovered the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, and Sinclair Lewis. He was impassioned by the words of these new literary figures and began to write poetry.

At the same time, Brown explored the rich world of African American music. Unlike his father and most students at Williams, he did not view the blues and jazz as degenerate forms of artistic expression. In the dormitory at night, when everyone else was asleep, according to S. P. Fullinwinder in The Mind and Mood of Black America, he "found himself a secluded corner, before he dared to defy the current cannons of sensibility by listening to Mamie Smith sing the blues."

Unlike many other black thinkers and scholars, Brown did not experience an inner conflict between the influence of European culture and the artistic legitimacy of African American music. As Fullinwinder explained, "His own success at breaking down the psychological barrier between himself and his people is probably due to the fact that, for him, the barrier never existed to begin with."

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa--as a member of the national honor society--from Williams, Brown entered Harvard University in 1922. Brown's instructors at Harvard included distinguished literary critic F. O. Matthiessen. There he was introduced to Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry, which first exposed him to the work of the literary imagists, an Anglo-American poetic movement devoted to writing predicated on, as Henry May wrote in The End of American Innocence, "intensity, condensation, the use of images rather than abstractions, and the development of new cadences appropriate to the purpose of the particular poem." Poets Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, however, had the most impact on Brown--their regional outlook and realistic view of the common man helped him to, as Sterling Stuckey wrote in his introduction to Southern Road, "take an uncondescending, that is to say a genuinely respectful, attitude toward the folk" he would later encounter in the South.

After earning a master's degree from Harvard in 1923, Brown decided on a teaching career. He took a job teaching English at the Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg, Virginia, at the urging of his father and historian Carter G. Woodson. Exposed to the rural population of the South, he discovered the essence of what he described as a "people's poetry." At Virginia Seminary, Brown befriended Calvin "Big Boy" Davis, an itinerant musician and singer who would later serve as the catalyst for several of Brown's poetic works. "He was a treasure trove of stories, songs," wrote Brown, as quoted in Sterling Brown: A UMUM Tribute. "He was a wandering guitar player.... He knew blues, ballads, spirituals. He had a fine repertoire, and he'd sing, and although all of us were on starvation wages, we'd hand him a little money, buy him something to drink and that was the evening.... This wasn't my introduction, but this was my deepening awareness of the importance of music."

In 1926 Brown began a two-year teaching job at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Here, too, he spent time out of the classroom seeking out interesting individuals and local musicians. In an area bordering the campus known as the "Foot," he met "Preacher," a self-appointed prophet of doom. In Jefferson City he befriended a waiter called "Slim," a yarn-spinner who would become another important source for Brown's poetry. Affectionately known as "Prof" by his students, Brown emerged as a gifted educator, directing and often acting in plays by Eugene O'Neill.

After class, Brown would invite students to his home, where they listened to the blues and jazz and read poetry that was not part of the university's English curriculum. As one former student recalled in Sterling Brown, "In our in-home gatherings, some of us learned about poems of Robert Burns that don't appear in college textbooks.... And they were the sort that would have had Brown railroaded out of town if he had read them in class. In the early 1920s Brown was a rarity; professors were inclined to be stuffy rather than sparkling."

Brown next taught at Fisk University where, from 1928 to 1929, he further won the affection of students. Continuing his search for African American culture, he would often make trips to Nashville, Tennessee, to watch blues singer Bessie Smith perform. He lived in an apartment on campus with his wife, Daisy Turnbull, whom he had married in 1927. One of Brown's Fisk colleagues recalled in Sterling Brown: "There was always a warmth in the greetings at the Brown's door. Daisy made us feel that we were expected. Sterling, with his pipe hanging loosely, had some quip to make.... His sardonic humor made the pomposity of some of his colleagues and the fancies and foibles of others tenderly amusing aspects of personality packages."

In 1925 Brown's poem "Roland Hayes," about the classical singer, became his first nationally published work, winning second prize in a contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine. Two years later, he won Opportunity's first prize for the poem "When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home," dedicated to Big Boy Davis. As the poem's narrator, Big Boy roams the landscape, his memory pouring forth images and characters from places where, as Brown concludes in the poem's last stanza, "we never could follow him."

Despite his growing profile as a poet and writer, Brown remained committed to his career as a teacher. He took a position at Howard University in 1929 and two years later, enrolled in the University's doctoral program. Brown's Southern Road, a collection of poems that had been published in various magazines between 1926 and 1929, including the prize-winning "When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home," was published in 1932. According to most critics, Southern Road ushered in a new era of black literary achievement.

Appearing during the wane of the Harlem Renaissance and the beginning of the Great Depression, Brown's volume featured symbolic folk heroes born during slavery and lone bluesmen, roustabouts, and convicts whose experiences transcended their race and region. In his assessment of the book's initial impact, Jean Wagner wrote in Black Poets of the United States, "If Sterling Brown succeeded in salvaging from despair what remained of man after the storm had subsided, it was essentially because he had drawn from past experience an unshakable faith in the eternal potentials of his race."

Brown's work in Southern Road represented a marked and conscious effort to break with an older African American literary tradition. Brown and his younger contemporaries, like Richard Wright, did not, as James O. Young wrote in Black Writers of the Thirties, "see the need for proving the negro's humanity, they assumed it." In his few poems that address urban life, Brown avoids the celebration of Harlem nightlife and its vogue; instead, he reveals a more ominous side of city life.

An experimental poem, "Cabaret" revolves around the jazz musician and his exploitative white employers who, along with their jewel-studded friends, look on the entertainer solely as a means of amusement. But as Wagner observed in Black Poets, "the customers and performers ... are only ... elements in the counterpoint, for the poem, by opposing myth to reality and superiors to inferiors, also evokes the older polarity of masters and slaves. This is the historic dimension that endows the poem with its full depth of meaning."

Through well-crafted verse steeped in folkloric images, music, and authentic dialect, Brown shows the diversity of rural African Americans. Brown's characters live within a picturesque yet segregated and harsh land. The book's title poem portrays a convict laborer's travail, as told in the rhythm of the African American worksong. Brown's repetitive use of the utterance "hunh"--the grunt of the worker's hammer as it falls--is used to punctuate certain lines, creating a haunting, chant-like rhythm. As Charles H. Rowell wrote in The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, the poem "is a lyrical expression of powerlessness and despondency--one picture of 'the tragedy of the southern Negro.'" Together with the numerous other voices comprising the volume, the convict's lament, becomes, as Rowell explained, "a picture of the tragic condition of Southern black life."

Brown's poems in Southern Road also echo an ironic humor. His Slim Greer pieces, based on an acquaintance in Jefferson City, are modern "tall tales." When faced with racism and oppression, the character of Greer relies on cleverness and wit to disarm his white persecutors. Greer's ability to combat psychic pain with mirth reflects Brown's admiration for a people whose stubborn will to overcome and nobility of character emerged in powerful forms of creative expression.

In 1937 Brown published the works The Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama, which were then the most extensive and in- depth studies of their kind. In The Negro in American Fiction, a survey of literature from the seventeenth century to the 1930s, Brown studied the image of blacks as presented by American authors. Examining various periods and locales, he identified stereotypes of what he called "The Contented Slave," "The Brute Negro," "The Wretched Freeman," "The Tragic Mulatto," "The Comic Negro," and "The Exotic Primitive." At the same time, he parallels the stereotypical portrayal of blacks in American fiction with caricatures created by writers of other cultures, the depiction by English writers of the "undesirable" Irish "Paddy," for example.

Brown served from 1936 to 1940 as Editor of Negro Affairs for the Work Projects Administration's (WPA) Federal Writer's Project--one of the few important positions bestowed on an African American as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which was designed to put the country back to work, among other goals, during the Depression. Overseeing a small staff of assistants, he supervised editorial operations concerning the contributions of black writers. As editor, he often protested the racist imagery of blacks found in WPA-sponsored state guidebooks. During his stay with the Federal Writers Project, he initiated the publication of the study The Negro in Virginia and the voluminous tour guidebook Washington, City and Capital.

In 1941 Brown, in collaboration with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, compiled and edited The Negro Caravan, a comprehensive anthology of African American essays, poetry, short stories, folklore, and drama. The editors amassed works from various eras and regions to demonstrate how the expression of black writers, despite their like- minded rejection of popular stereotypes and a common racial cause, represented no single literary form or "one unique cultural pattern." Their intent was to present a "truthful mosaic of negro characters" that would help represent the true black experience in America.

Among the work's many selections were Brown's poems "Long Gone," "Slim in Hell," "Ole Lem," "Break of Day," and "Strong Men." Brown also contributed to Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal's classic 1944 study of African Americans, An American Dilemma. Along with such scholars as Ralphe Bunche, Horace Cayton, Melville J. Herskovits, and Charles S. Johnson, Brown provided Myrdal with criticism and advice in the compilation of his more than one-thousand-page study of black American life.

While undertaking short-term teaching positions at the University of Minnesota in 1945, New York University from 1949 to 1950, and the University of Illinois from 1967 until 1968, Brown retained his position at Howard until his retirement in 1969. There he continued to expose students to African American literature and music. Because Howard had forbidden the teaching of black American folk music, Brown held his own classes on blues and jazz music. Among his students at Howard were poet and writer Amiri Baraka, activist Stokely Carmicheal, and actor Ossie Davis. "His teaching had a very liberating effect on me," commented Davis, as quoted in Sterling Brown. "He was a scholar, but Sterling was homey, Negro, grits and gravy."

In 1975 a small Detroit-based press, concerned that Brown's volume Southern Road had been out of print for several years, published The Last Ride of Wild Bill, which offered readers many of the poet's finest verse along with a new piece, "The Last Ride Of Wild Bill." A year later, a group of noted black writers and intellectuals from the Black History Museum Committee paid homage to Brown by publishing the compendium Sterling Brown: A UMUM Tribute. Among the book's contributors were several former students including Baraka and Leopold S. Senghor, president of the West African nation of Senegal.

As poet, folklorist, and teacher, Brown's influence has extended far and wide. His legacy lies in rebellion, the refusal to accept the stereotypical and romanticized image of blacks as put forth by both African American and white writers. When black scholars and intellectuals dismissed blues and jazz as substandard folk art, Brown emerged as an outspoken champion of these unique forms. Reflecting on his experiences in the South, Brown explained in The Harlem Renaissance, "I learned the strength of my people. I learned the fortitude. I learned the humor. I learned the tragedy."

Indeed, Brown's passion for the culture and music of his people is brilliantly captured in his writing. His poetic subjects, like black folk heroes of the past, remain timeless symbols of a still universal struggle to preserve humanity. Describing the universality of Brown's poetry, James O. Young wrote in Black Writers of the Thirties, "Brown's genius is such that he sculpts simple, plain speech into poetry, as he unveils the value ensemble of a people. The reader will discover, almost in a flash, that he has entered a world as wonderously complex as life itself."

Awards

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa national honor society, c. 1922; second prize from Opportunity magazine, for poem "Roland Hayes"; first prize from Opportunity, for poem "When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home," 1927.

Works

Writings

• Poetry Southern Road, Beacon Press, 1974.
• The Last Ride of Wild Bill, Broadside Press, 1975.
• The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, Harper & Row, 1980.
• Nonfiction Outline for the Study of Poetry of American Negroes, Harcourt Brace, 1931.
• The Negro in American Fiction, Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.
• Negro Poetry and Drama, Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.

Further Reading

Sources

• Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, edited by James A.
• Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross, Free Press, 1968.
• Fullinwinder, S. P., The Mind and Mood of Black America, Dorsey Press, 1969.
• The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by William S. Shiver and Stanley Brodwin, with an introduction by Amritjit Singh, Garland, 1989.
• Kramer, Victor A., The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined, AMS Press, 1987.
• May, Henry, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, Quadrangle Books, 1959.
• Myrdal, Gunnar, with Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 1944.
• Sterling Brown: A UMUM Tribute, edited by the Black History Museum Committee, 1976.
• Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Lawrence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, translated by Kenneth Douglas, University of Illinois Press, 1973.
• Young, James O., Black Writers of the Thirties, Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

— John Cohassey

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (March 2008)

Sterling Allen Brown (May 1, 1901 – January 13, 1989) was an African-American professor, author of works on folklore, poetry and literary criticism. He was interested chiefly in black culture of the Southern United States.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Academic career 3 Literary career 4 Honors 5 Works 6 References 7 External links

Early life

Brown was born on the campus of Howard University in Washington D.C.. His father, Sterling N. Brown, a former slave, was a prominent minister and professor at Howard University Divinity School. His mother Grace Adelaide Brown taught in D.C. public schools for over fifty years. Brown was educated at Dunbar High School and graduated as the top student. He received a scholarship to attend Williams College. Graduating from Williams Phi Beta Kappa in 1922, he continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving an MA a year later.

The same year, he became an English teacher at Virginia Theological Seminary, a position he would hold for the next three years. In 1927 he married Daisy Turnbull. They had two children.

Academic career

Brown began his teaching career with positions at several universities, including Lincoln University and Fisk University, before returning to Howard in 1929. He was a professor there for forty years. He taught and wrote about African-American literature and folklore. He was a pioneer in the appreciation of this genre.

Brown was known for introducing his students to concepts then popular in jazz, which along with blues, spirituals and other forms of black music formed an integral component of his poetry.

In addition to his career at Howard University, Brown served as a visiting professor at Vassar College, New York University (NYU), Atlanta University, and Yale University.

Some of his notable students include Toni Morrison, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sowell, Ossie Davis, and Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones).

In 1969 Brown retired from his faculty position at Howard and turned full time to poetry

He was also a life member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity, one of the first African-American fraternities.

Literary career

In 1933 Brown published his first book of poetry Southern Road. It was a collection of poetry with rural themes and treated the simple lives of poor, black, country folk with poignancy and dignity. It also used authentic dialect and structures. Despite the success of this book, he struggled to find a publisher for the followup, No Hiding Place.

His poetic work was influenced in content, form and cadence by African-American music, including work songs, blues and jazz. Like that of Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and other black writers of the period, his work often dealt with race and class in the United States. He was deeply interested in a folk-based culture, which he considered most authentic. Brown is considered part of the Harlem Renaissance artistic tradition, although he spent the majority of his life in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast Washington, D.C..

Honors

In 1979, the District of Columbia declared May 1, his birthday, Sterling A. Brown Day.^[1]

His Collected Poems won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in the early 1980s for the best book of poetry published that year.^[2]

In 1984 the District of Columbia named him its first poet laureate, a position he held until his death from leukemia at the age of 88.^[2]

The Friends of Libraries USA in 1997 named Founders Hall at Howard University a Literary Landmark, the first so designated in Washington, DC.^[1]

Works

• Southern Road, Harcourt, Brace and company, 1932 (original poetry)
• Negro Poetry (literary criticism)
• Negro poetry and drama: and the Negro in American fiction, Atheneum, 1972 (criticism)
• The Negro Caravan, 1941, co-editor with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee (anthology of African-American literature)
• The Last Ride of Wild Bill (poetry)
• Michael S. Harper, ed (1996). The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 9780810150454. http://books.google.com/books?id=RObWO8HzxtMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Sterling+inauthor:Allen+inauthor:Brown#v=onepage&q=&f=false.  (1st edition 1980)
• The Poetry of Sterling Brown, recorded 1946-1973, released on Smithsonian Folkways, 1995
• Mark A. Sanders, ed (1996). A son's return: selected essays of Sterling A. Brown. UPNE. ISBN 9781555532758. http://books.google.com/books?id=onyOqAw8aaUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:Sterling+inauthor:Allen+inauthor:Brown#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "A Literary Tribute to Sterling A. Brown", Howard University, Imogene Zachery, accessed 15 Apr 2008
2. ^ ^{a b} Sterling A. Brown, The Literacy Encyclopedia, accessed 15 Apr 2008

External links

• A Literary Tribute to Sterling A. Brown
• Sterling A. Brown, The Literacy Encyclopedia
• Sterling A. Brown at Modern America Poetry
• Sterling A. Brown at The Academy of American Poets
• Sterling Brown's letter on Brookland at Brookland Area Writers & Artists
• Sterling Allen Brown: Writer, Folklorist, Educator
• Sterling Nelson Brown's autobiography, My Own Life Story
• Sterling Brown Discography at Smithsonian Folkways

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)