For other people of the same name, see Larry Brown (disambiguation).

Larry Brown (July 9, 1951–November 24, 2004) was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 novelist, non-fiction

Non-fiction

Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...

 and short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

. He was a winner of numerous awards including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters

Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters

The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters is a privately funded foundation created to recognize annually the greatest accomplishments in art, music, literature, and photography among Mississippians. The idea was conceived by, among others, former Mississippi Governor William Winter, Dr. Cora...

 award for fiction

Fiction

Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...

, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and Mississippi's Governor's

Mississippi

Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...

 Award For Excellence in the Arts. He was also the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction. His notable works include Dirty Work, Father and Son, Joe and Big Bad Love

Big Bad Love

Big Bad Love is a 2001 film directed by Arliss Howard, who co-wrote the script with his brother, James Howard, based on a collection of short stories of the same name by Larry Brown. The story recounts an episode in the life of an alcoholic Vietnam veteran and struggling writer named Leon Barlow,...

. A film of the latter, starring Debra Winger

Debra Winger

Mary Debra Winger is an American actress. Three-times an Oscar nominee, she received awards for acting in Terms of Endearment, for which she won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress in 1983, and in A Dangerous Woman, for which she won the Tokyo International Film Festival...

 and Arliss Howard

Arliss Howard

Arliss Howard is an American actor, writer and film director.-Life and career:Howard was born in Independence, Missouri in 1954, and graduated from Truman High School and Columbia College at Columbia, Missouri. Howard established his career with stand-out roles in Full Metal Jacket and Ruby...

 was released in 2001.

Independent filmmaker Gary Hawkins has directed an award winning documentary of Brown's life and work in The Rough South of Larry Brown.

Life and writing

Brown was born and lived near Oxford, Mississippi

Oxford, Mississippi

Oxford is a city in, and the county seat of, Lafayette County, Mississippi, United States. Founded in 1835, it was named after the British university city of Oxford in hopes of having the state university located there, which it did successfully attract....

. He graduated from high school in Oxford but did not go to college. Many years later, he took a creative writing class from the Mississippi novelist Ellen Douglas

Ellen Douglas

Ellen Douglas is the pen name of Josephine Ayres Haxton , an American author. Her book Apostles of Light was a National Book Award nominee.She was born in Natchez, Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana and Arkansas...

. Brown served in the United States Marine Corps

United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...

 from 1970 to 1972. On his return to Oxford, he worked at a small stove company before joining the city fire department.

An avid reader, Brown began writing in his spare time while he worked as a firefighter (at City Station No.1 on North Lamar Blvd.) in Oxford in 1980. The nonfiction book On Fire describes how Brown, having trouble with sleeping at the fire station, would stay up to read and write while the other firefighters slept. His duties as a firefighter included answering fire alarms at Rowan Oak — the home of William Faulkner, but now a museum — and the University of Mississippi campus.

By his own account Brown wrote five unpublished novels, including the first one he wrote about a man-eating bear loose in Yellowstone Park. Nonetheless, it served Brown as a favorite example for younger writers to not be discouraged, if only to judge by this rather unceremonious beginning to a writing career. Brown also indicated that he wrote hundreds of short stories before he began to be published. In fact, his first publication was a short story that appeared in the June 1982 issue of biker magazine Easyriders

Easyriders

Easyriders is an American motorcycle magazine, founded in 1971. It is published monthly by Paisano Publications, LLC.In addition to its coverage of motorcycles and related activities, Easyriders is also known for including pictures of nude or topless women and paintings by David Mann who was a...

. His first books were two collections of short stories: Facing the Music (1988) and Big Bad Love

Big Bad Love

Big Bad Love is a 2001 film directed by Arliss Howard, who co-wrote the script with his brother, James Howard, based on a collection of short stories of the same name by Larry Brown. The story recounts an episode in the life of an alcoholic Vietnam veteran and struggling writer named Leon Barlow,...

(1990). After 1990, Brown turned to writing full time and increasingly turned to the novel as his primary form. Brown's novels include Dirty Work (1989

1989 in literature

The year 1989 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 24 - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini places a US$3 million bounty for the death of The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie.-Literature:...

), Father and Son (1996), Joe (1991), Fay (2000

2000 in literature

The year 2000 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 13 - Final original Peanuts comic strip is published...

), and The Rabbit Factory (2003). His later works, especially, are marked by gritty realism, sudden and shocking violence, and dischronic narrative.

In March 2007, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill published Brown's unfinished novel A Miracle of Catfish. Although Brown died before finishing the book, the final page of the published version includes his notes about how he wanted the novel to end. The novel also includes a lengthy introduction by Brown's editor, Shannon Ravenel, discussing her work on the project and her work with Brown over the years. Except for the novel The Rabbit Factory, all of Brown's books were published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing. The paperback editions of Brown's early works were published by Vintage Books

Vintage Books

Vintage Books is a publishing imprint founded in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf. Its publishing list includes world literature, fiction, and non-fiction...

, a division of Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

, although other paperback houses picked up his later works.

Brown's nonfiction includes On Fire (1995), on the subject of his 17 years (1973–1990) as a firefighter, and Billy Ray's Farm (2001).

For one semester, Brown taught as a writer-in-residence in the creative writing

Creative writing

Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...

 program at the University of Mississippi, temporarily taking over the position held by his friend Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah

Howard Barry Hannah was an American novelist and short story writer from Mississippi.The author of eight novels and five short story collections , Hannah worked with notable American editors and publishers such as Gordon Lish, Seymour Lawrence, and Morgan Entrekin...

. He later served as visiting writer at the University of Montana in Missoula. He taught briefly at other colleges throughout the United States. He has been compared to other Southern writers, including Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...

, William Faulkner

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...

 and Harry Crews

Harry Crews

Harry Crews is an American novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Bacon County, Georgia in 1935 and served in the Marines during the Korean War. He attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill, but dropped out to travel...

. In interviews and some of his essays, Brown cited these authors, along with Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...

, Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s....

 and Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles...

, as influences

Brown had also cited contemporary music as an influence, and his tastes were broad. He appeared with the Texas alt-rock band fronted by Alejandro Escovedo

Alejandro Escovedo

Alejandro Escovedo is an American singer-songwriter.-Biography:The son of Mexican immigrants to Texas, Escovedo is from a family that boasts several professional musicians, including brothers Coke Escovedo and Pete Escovedo, and Sheila E...

, a good friend of his, and he cited the lyrics of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...

 as an influence. He also had friends in the film industry, including Billy Bob Thornton

Billy Bob Thornton

Billy Bob Thornton is an American actor, screenwriter, director and musician. Thornton gained early recognition as a cast member on the CBS sitcom Hearts Afire and in several early 1990s films including On Deadly Ground and Tombstone...

.

Brown died of an apparent heart attack

Myocardial infarction

Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...

 at his home in the Yocona community, near Oxford, in November 2004.

Works

• Facing the Music (1988) - short stories
• Dirty Work (1989) - novel
• Big Bad Love (1990) - short stories
• Joe (1991) - novel
• On Fire (1993) - autobiography
• Father and Son (1996) - novel
• Fay (2000) - novel
• Billy Ray's Farm: Essays from a Place Called Tula (2001) - Essays
• The Rabbit Factory (2003) - novel
• A Miracle of Catfish (2007) - novel (posthumous)

External links

• Larry Brown at The Mississippi Writer's Page
• Larry Brown Collection (MUM00051) owned by The University of Mississippi Department of Archives and Special Collections
• Larry Brown's page at The Mississippi Writers and Musicians Project at Starkville High School