Brown, Sterling Allen 1901–1989

PERSONAL: Born May 1, 1901, in Washington, DC; died of leukemia, January 13, 1989, in Takoma Park, MD; son of Sterling Nelson (a writer and professor of religion at Howard University) and Adelaide Allen Brown; married Daisy Turnbull, September, 1927; children: John L. Dennis. Education: Williams College, A.B., 1922; Harvard University, A.M., 1923, graduate study, 1930–31.

CAREER: Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, VA, English teacher, 1923–26; also worked as a teacher at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO, 1926–28, and at Fisk University, 1928–29; Howard University, Washington, DC, professor of English, 1929–69. Visiting professor at University of Illinois, University of Minnesota, New York University, New School for Social Research, Sarah Lawrence College, and Vassar College. Editor on Negro Affairs, Federal Writers' Project, 1936–39, and staff member of Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro, 1939.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing, 1937; honorary doctorates from Howard University, 1971, University of Massachusetts, 1971, Northwestern University, 1973, Williams College and Boston University, both 1974, Brown University and Lewis and Clark College, both 1975, Harvard University, Yale University, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), and University of Pennsylvania; Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, 1982, for The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown; named poet laureate of District of Columbia, 1984.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Southern Road, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1932, revised edition, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1974.

Sixteen Poems by Sterling Brown (sound recording), Folkway Records, 1973.

The Last Ride of Wild Bill, and Eleven Narrative Poems, Broadside Press (Detroit, MI), 1975.

The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, selected by Michael S. Harper, Harper (New York, NY), 1980, reprinted, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1996.

NONFICTION

The Negro in American Fiction (also see below), Associates in Negro Folk Education (Washington, D.C.), 1937, Argosy-Antiquarian (New York, NY), 1969.

Negro Poetry and Drama (also see below), Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937, revised edition, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1969.

(Editor, with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, and contributor) The Negro Caravan, Dryden, 1941, revised edition, Arno (New York, NY), 1970.

Negro Poetry and Drama [and] The Negro in American Fiction, Ayer (New York, NY), 1969.

(With George E. Haynes) The Negro Newcomers in Detroit [and] The Negro in Washington, Arno (New York, NY), 1970.

A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Mark A. Sanders, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

Also author of Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes, 1930.

CONTRIBUTOR

Benjamin A. Botkin, editor, Folk-Say, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1930.

American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project, with Sixteen Prints by the Federal Arts Project, U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, DC), 1937.

Washington City and Capital, U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, DC), 1937.

The Integration of the Negro into American Society, Howard University Press (Washington, DC), 1951.

Lillian D. Hornstein, G.D. Percy, and others, editors, The Reader's Companion to World Literature, New American Library (New York, NY), 1956.

Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, editors, The Book of Negro Folklore, Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1958.

John Henrik Clarke, editor, American Negro Short Stories, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 1966.

Also contributor to What the Negro Wants, 1948. Contributor of poetry and articles to anthologies and journals, including Crisis, Contempo, Nation, New Republic, and Journal of Negro Education. Contributor of column, "The Literary Scene: Chronicle and Comment" to Opportunity, beginning 1931.

SIDELIGHTS: Sterling Allen Brown devoted his life to the development of an authentic black folk literature. A poet, critic, and teacher at Howard University for forty years, Brown was one of the first people to identify folklore as a vital component of the black aesthetic and to recognize its validity as a form of artistic expression. He worked to legitimatize this genre in several ways. As a critic, he exposed the shortcomings of white literature that stereotypes blacks and demonstrated why black authors are best suited to describe the negro experience. As a poet, he mined the rich vein of black Southern culture, replacing primitive or sentimental caricatures with authentic folk heroes drawn from Afro-American sources. As a teacher, Brown encouraged self-confidence among his students, urging them to find their own literary voices and to educate themselves to be an audience worthy of receiving the special gifts of black literature. Overall, Brown's influence in the field of Afro-American literature was so great that scholar Darwin T. Turner told Ebony magazine: "I discovered that all trails led, at some point, to Sterling Brown. His Negro Caravan was the anthology of Afro-American literature. His unpublished study of Afro-American theater was the major work in the field. His study of images of Afro-Americans in American literature was a pioneer work. His essays on folk literature and folklore were preeminent. He was not always the best critic … but Brown was and is the literary historian who wrote the Bible for the study of Afro-American literature."

Brown's dedication to his field has been unflinching, but it was not until he was in his late sixties that the author received widespread public acclaim. Before then, he labored in obscurity on the campus of Howard University. His fortune improved in 1968 when the Black Consciousness movement revived an interest in his work. In 1969, two of his most important books of criticism, Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction, were reprinted by Argosy; five years later, in 1974, Beacon Press reissued Southern Road, his first book of poems. These reprintings stimulated a reconsideration of the author, which culminated in the publication of The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown in 1980. More than any other single publication, it is this title, which won the 1982 Lenore Marshall Poetry prize, that brought Brown widespread recognition.

Because he had largely stopped writing poetry by the end of the 1940s, most of Collected Poems is comprised of Brown's early verse. Yet the collection is not the work of an apprentice, but rather "reveals Brown as a master and presence indeed," in the view of a Virginia Quarterly Review critic. While acknowledging that "his effective range is narrow," the critic called Brown "a first-rate narrative poet, an eloquent prophet of the folk, and certainly our finest author of Afro-American dialect." New York Times Book Review contributor Henry Louis Gates appreciated that in Collected Poems, "Brown never lapses into bathos or sentimentality. His characters confront catastrophe with all of the irony and stoicism of the blues and of black folklore. What's more, he is able to realize such splendid results in a variety of forms, including the classic and standard blues, the ballad, the sonnet and free verse." Despite Brown's relatively small poetic output, Washington Post critic Joseph McClellen believed this collection "is enough to establish the poet as one of our best."

After high school, Brown won a scholarship to the predominantly white, Ivy League institution, Williams College. There he first began writing poetry. While other young poets his age were imitating T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and other high modernists, Brown was not impressed with their "puzzle poetry." Instead, he turned for his models to the narrative versifiers, poets such as Edward Arlington Robinson, who captured the tragic drama of ordinary lives, and Robert Frost, who used terse vernacular that sounded like real people talking. At Williams, Brown studied literature with George Dutton, a critical realist who would exert a lasting influence. "Dutton was teaching Joseph Conrad," Brown recalled, as reported in the New Republic. "He said Joseph Conrad was being lionized in England … [but] Conrad was sitting over in the corner, quiet, not participating. Dutton said he was brooding and probably thinking about his native Poland and the plight of his people. He looked straight at me. I don't know what he meant, but I think he meant, and this is symbolic to me, I think he meant don't get fooled by any lionizing, don't get fooled by being here at Williams with a selective clientele. There is business out there that you have to take care of. Your people, too, are in a plight. I've never forgotten it."

Brown came to believe that one way to help his people was through his writing. "When Carl Sandburg said 'yes' to the American people, I wanted to say 'yes' to my people," Brown recalled in New Directions: The Howard University Magazine. In 1923, after receiving his masters degree from Harvard, Brown embarked on a series of teaching jobs that would help him determine what form that "yes" should assume. He moved south and began to teach among the common people. As an instructor, he gained a reputation as a "red ink man," because he covered his students' papers with corrections. But as a poet, he was learning important lessons from students about black Southern life. Attracted by his openness and easygoing manner, they invited him into their homes to hear work songs, ballads, and the colorful tales of local lore. He met ex-coal-miner Calvin "Big Boy" Davis, who became the inspiration for Brown's "Odyssey of Big Boy" and "Long Gone," as well as singer Luke Johnson, whom he paid a quarter for each song Luke wrote down. As Brown began to amass his own folklore collection, "he realized that worksongs, ballads, blues, and spirituals were, at their best, poetical expressions of Afro-American life," wrote Robert O'Meally in the New Republic. "And he became increasingly aware of black language as often ironic, understated and double-edged."

In 1929, the same year his father died, Brown returned to Howard University, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Three years later, Harcourt, Brace published Southern Road, a first book of poems, drawn primarily from material he had gathered during his travels south. The book was heralded as a breakthrough for black poetry. Alain Locke, one of the chief proponents of what was then called the New Negro Movement, acknowledged the importance of the work in an essay collected in Negro Anthology. After explaining that the primary objective of Negro poetry should be "the poetic portrayal of Negro folk-life … true in both letter and spirit to the idiom of the folk's own way of feeling and thinking," he declared that with the appearance of Southern Road, it could be said "that here for the first time is that much-desired and long-awaited acme attained or brought within actual reach."

The success of Southern Road did not insure Brown's future as a publishing poet. Not only did Harcourt, Brace reject No Hiding Place when Brown submitted the manuscript a few years later, they also declined to issue a second printing of Southern Road, because they did not think it would be profitable. These decisions had a devastating impact upon Brown's poetic reputation. Because no new poems appeared, many of his admirers assumed he had stopped writing. "That assumption," wrote Sterling Stuckey in his introduction to Collected Poems, "together with sadly deficient criticism from some quarters, helped to fix his place in time—as a not very important poet of the past."

Discouraged over the reception of his poems, Brown shifted his energies to other arenas; he continued teaching, but also produced a steady stream of book reviews, essays, and sketches about black life. He argued critically for many of the same goals he had pursued in verse: recognition of a black aesthetic, accurate depiction of the black experience, and the development of a literature worthy of his people's past. One of his most influential forums for dissemination of his ideas was a regular column he wrote for Opportunity magazine. There "Brown argued for realism as a mode in literature and against such romantic interpretations of the South as the ones presented in I'll Take My Stand, the manifesto of Southern agrarianism produced by contributors to the Fugitive, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren," wrote R.V. Burnette in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Although he praised the efforts of white writers like Howard Odum ('he is a poetic craftsman as well as a social observer'), he was relentless in his criticism of popular works that distorted black life and character."

Brown did not limit his writing to periodicals, but also produced several major books on Afro-American studies. His 1938 works, Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction, are seminal studies of black literary history. The former shows the growth of black artists within the context of American literature and delineates a black aesthetic; the latter examines what has been written about the black man in American fiction since his first appearance in obscure novels of the 1700s. A pioneering work that depicts how the prejudice facing blacks in real life is duplicated in their stereotyped treatment in literature, The Negro in American Fiction differs "from the usual academic survey by giving a penetrating analysis of the social factors and attitudes behind the various schools and periods considered," Alain Locke noted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

In 1941, Brown and two colleagues Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses S. Lee edited The Negro Caravan, a book that "defined the field of Afro-American literature as a scholarly and academic discipline," according to Ebony contributor. In this anthology, Brown demonstrates how black writers have been influenced by the same literary currents that have shaped the consciousness of all American writers—"puritan didacticism, sentimental humanitarianism, local color, regionalism, realism, naturalism, and experimentalism"—and thus are not exclusively bound by strictures of race. The work has timeless merit, according to Julius Lester, who wrote in the introduction to the 1970 revised edition that "it comes as close today as it did in 1941 to being the most important single volume of black writing ever published."

Commenting on Brown's legacy to American literature, Eleanor W. Traylor, R. Victoria Arana, and John M. Reilly, writing in African American Review, noted, "He was a pioneer cultural critic, anticipating the trends in recent literary theory that have interconnected anthropology, sociology, folklore, linguistics, race politics, and religion to the study of literature. He anticipated the deconstructionist critique of logocentrism by showing the primacy of the labeling word in American literature and culture. He anticipated the field of Gender Studies by pointing out the ways discourse can structure, prejudice, illuminate, and restructure the same human experiences." Also writing in African American Review, Fahamisha Patricia Brown, pointed out that Brown was able to portray blacks as being both distinct from American mainstream culture and literature while also demonstrating blacks' essential contribution to both. The writer went on to note, "As a student, scholar, and performer of Black poetry, I have found in the work of Sterling A. Brown a subject of study, a critical resource, and a body of texts which translate to the stage to the delight of varied audiences." Brown also added, "I would be remiss if I did not point out how well Brown's poems exemplify his theory. His portraits of Black folk, his tall tales and ballads, his music, and his talk, with its irony, exaggeration, hyperbole, wit, and sophistication, exemplify the suggestions he made for a Negro American literary expression."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brown, Sterling Allen, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, selected by Michael S. Harper, Harper (New York, NY), 1980.

Brown, Sterling Allen, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, editors, The Negro Caravan, Dryden, 1941, revised edition, Arno (New York, NY), 1970.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 23, 1983; Volume 59, 1990.

Cunard, Nancy, editor, Negro Anthology, Wishart Co. (London, England), 1934.

Davis, Arthur P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960, Howard University Press (Washington), 1974.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 48: American Poets, 1880–1945, Second Series, 1986; Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, 1987; Volume 63: Modern American Critics, 1920–1955, 1988.

Gabbin, Joanne V., Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1994.

Gayle, Addison, Jr., editor, Black Expression: Essays by and about Black Americans in the Creative Arts, Weybright & Talley (New York, NY), 1969.

Mangione, Jerre, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935–1943, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1972.

Wagner, Jean, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, translated by Kenneth Douglas, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1973.

PERIODICALS

African American Review, fall, 1997, Eleanor W. Traylor, R. Victoria Arana, John M. Reilly, "'Runnin' Space': The Continuing Legacy of Sterling Allen Brown," p. 389; fall, 1997, Ronald D. Palmer, "Memories of Sterling Brown," p. 433; fall, 1997, Fahamisha Patricia Brown, "And I Owe It All to Sterling Brown: The Theory and Practice of Black Literary Studies," p. 449.

Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1980.

Callaloo: A Black South Journal of Arts and Letters, February-May, 1982.

Ebony, October, 1976.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 3, 1980.

New Directions: The Howard University Magazine, winter, 1974.

New Republic, February 11, 1978; December 20, 1982.

New York Times, May 15, 1932.

New York Times Book Review, November 30, 1969; January 11, 1981.

Studies in the Literary Imagination, fall, 1974.

Village Voice, January 14, 1981.

Virginia Quarterly Review, winter, 1981.

Washington Post, November 16, 1969; May 2, 1979; September 4, 1980; May 12, 1984.