Sterling Allen Brown
|Sterling Allen Brown|
|Born||1 May 1901
|Died||13 January 1989|
|Other names||Sterling A. Brown|
|Alma mater||Dunbar High School, Williams College, Harvard University|
Sterling Allen Brown (May 1, 1901 – January 13, 1989) was an African-American professor, author of works on folklore, poet and literary critic. He studied chiefly black culture of the Southern United States and was a full professor at Howard University for most of his career. He also had visiting professor stints at several other institutions, including Vassar College, New York University (NYU), Atlanta University, and Yale University.
Early life and education
Sterling A. Brown was born on the campus of Howard University in Washington D.C., where his father, Sterling N. Brown, a former slave, was a prominent minister and professor at Howard University Divinity School. His mother Grace Adelaide Brown, who had been the valedictorian of her class at Fisk University, taught in D.C. public schools for more than 50 years. Both his parents grew up in Tennessee and often shared stories with Brown, their sixth child and only son, who heard his father’s stories about famous leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.
Brown's early childhood was spent on a farm on Whiskey Bottom Road in Howard County, Maryland. He was educated at Waterford Oaks Elementary and Dunbar High School, where he graduated as the top student. He received a scholarship to attend Williams College in Massachusetts. Graduating from Williams Phi Beta Kappa in 1922, he continued his studies at Harvard University, receiving an MA a year later. That same year of 1923, he was hired as an English lecturer at Virginia Theological Seminary and College in Lynchburg, Virginia, a position he would hold for the next three years. He never pursued a doctorate degree, but several colleges he attended gave him honorary doctorates.
Marriage and family
In 1927 Brown married Daisy Turnbull. They adopted one child, a son. Brown's wife Daisy inspired his poems "Long Track Blues" and "Against That Day".
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 40 years. Brown's poetry used the south for its setting and showed slave experiences of the African American people. Brown often imitated southern African-American speech, using "variant spellings and apostrophes to mark dropped consonants". He taught and wrote about African-American literature and folklore. He was a pioneer in the appreciation of this genre. He had an "active, imaginative mind" when writing and "a natural gift for dialogue, description and narration".
In 1969 Brown retired from his faculty position at Howard and turned full-time to poetry.
In 1932 Brown published his first book of poetry Southern Road. It was a collection of poems 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.
- "Harvard has ruined more niggers than bad liquor."
In 1979, the District of Columbia declared May 1, his birthday, Sterling A. Brown Day.
The Friends of Libraries USA in 1997 named Founders Hall at Howard University a Literary Landmark, the first so designated in Washington, DC.
The home where Brown resided is located in the Brookland section of Northeast Washington, DC. An engraved plaque and a sign created by the DC Commission On Arts And Humanities are featured in front of the house.
- Southern Road, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932 (original poetry)
- Negro Poetry (literary criticism)
- The Negro in American Fiction, Bronze booklet - no. 6 (1937), published by The Associates in Negro Folk Education (Washington, D.C.)
- 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 978-0-8101-5045-4. (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 978-1-55553-275-8.
- Thompson-Taylor, Betty (2008). "The Poetry of Brown". Masterplots II: African American Literature.
- Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1998). "Looking for Sterling Brown's Howard County". Callaloo (Johns Hopkins University Press): 870–881. doi:10.1353/cal.1998.0227. JSTOR 3299758.
- Gabbin, Joanne (1985). Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
- The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. September 30, 1996. Missing or empty
- Thompson-Taylor, Betty (2008). "The Poetry of Brown".
His wife Daisy inspired Brown’s poems, 'Long Track Blues' and 'Against That Day.'
- Thompson-Taylor, Betty (2002). "Sterling Brown". Critical Survey Of Poetry.
- Fleming, Robert (May 1, 2007). "A Negro Looks At The South". Black Issues Book Review (The Free Library). Retrieved February 3, 2015.
- Thomas Sowell, "Halls of Ivy", A Personal Odyssey, The Free Press, 2000, p. 117.
- Imogene Zachery, "A Literary Tribute to Sterling A. Brown", Howard University, accessed April 15, 2008.
- Sterling A. Brown, The Literacy Encyclopedia, accessed April 15, 2008.
- "Brookland History Lives! Sterling Brown House", The Brookland Bridge, September 1, 2012.
- A Literary Tribute to Sterling A. Brown
- Sterling A. Brown at Modern America Poetry
- Sterling A. Brown at The Academy of American Poets
- Sterling Nelson Brown's autobiography, My Own Life Story
- "E. Ethelbert Miller on Sterling Brown". E. Ethelbert Miller.
- Sterling Brown Discography at Smithsonian Folkways