The directory «Plots»

Brown Sterling Allen
(1901—1989)

Sterling Allen Brown was an African American teacher and writer on folklore of poetry and of literary criticism. He was mainly interested in black culture from the Southern United States.

He was born on the campus of Howard University in Washington D.C., where his father (a former slave and prominent minister) was a professor. He was educated at Dunbar High School and graduated as the top student for which 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 Seminary and College, a position he would hold for the next three years. In 1927 he married Daisy Turnbull. He had two kids.

Brown began his teaching career at a number of universities, including Lincoln University and Fisk University, before returning to Howard in 1929 as a teacher where he remained for forty years. During his time there he taught and wrote about African-American literature and folklore and 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 music with an extensive history among black Americans-formed an integral component of his poetry. In 1969 he retired from his faculty position at Harvard and returned to his professional career as a poet.

In 1932 he 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 (book).

His poetic work was influenced in content, form and cadence by the African American music including work songs, blues and jazz. Like 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. Brown is usually 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., where he was the city's poet laureate until his death from leukemia at the age of 88.

Uganda, 1998, Sterling Allen Brown