Larry Brown, Author of Spare, Dark Stories, Dies at 53
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: November 26, 2004
Larry Brown, a writer whose spare stories bluntly conveyed
the painful hope of the rural poor, died on Wednesday at his
home near Oxford, Miss. He was 53.
The coroner of Lafayette County, Miss., told The Associated
Press that the cause had not been officially determined. But
a spokesman for Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N. C., Mr.
Brown's longtime publisher, said that the cause was believed
to be a heart attack.
Algonquin published a number of Mr. Brown's books, including
the short story
"Big Bad Love," in 1990; the novels "Joe" (1991), "Father and
Son"
(1996) and "Fay" (2000); and two works of nonfiction, "On
Fire" (1994) and "Billy Ray's Farm" (2001). A final novel,
"The Rabbit Factory," was published last year by Free Press.
"Big Bad Love" was the basis for a 2001 film, directed by
Arliss Howard.
William Larry Brown was born on July 9, 1951, in Oxford, a
town with a literary tradition stretching from William
Faulkner to John Grisham. But for much of his life Mr. Brown,
the son of a restless sharecropper father and a mother who
was a store owner and postmaster, seemed to be anything but
the bookish type.
Before graduating from high school in 1969, he failed senior
English and had to attend summer school, he told an
interviewer in 2000. Soon after, he enlisted in the Marines,
serving for two years in noncombat positions.
After his discharge Mr. Brown returned to Mississippi, where
he worked a variety of odd jobs - over the years they
included lumberjack, house painter, hay hauler and fence
builder - before joining the Oxford Fire Department in
1973.
He remained a firefighter for 16 years, during which he began
to teach himself how to write, reading obsessively the work
of Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and, of
course, Faulkner. For years afterward he would be referred to
as "the fireman-writer," enough so that he tired of that
designation and discouraged its use.
Though he took one writing course at the University of
Mississippi, he honed his craft by writing scores of stories,
many of which were rejected before he got one published in
1982 in, of all places, Easyriders, a bikers' magazine.
Five years later another story, "Facing the Music," published
in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal, caught the
attention of Shannon Ravenel, a founder of Algonquin Books.
"I called him and asked if he had other stories," Ms. Ravenel
recalled. "He said he had a lot."
Algonquin published nine of them in a 1988 collection, also
titled "Facing the Music." A novel came a year later: "Dirty
Work," about two Vietnam veterans from Mississippi - one
white, the other black; one with his face blown off, the
other missing all four limbs - who find themselves in
adjacent hospital beds.
"Right from the beginning he was willing to look very
straight into the depths of human pain without blinking," Ms.
Ravenel said. "If you didn't blink and were willing to stand
there and look with him, you could learn some remarkable
things."
Mr. Brown's characters had dark, brutal lives, often
overtaken by drinking and sex and ruinous relationships. But
Mr. Brown, though as spare in conversation as in his writing,
was neither brooding nor a wanderer. He is survived by his
mother, Leona Brown, of Tula, Miss., near Oxford; his wife of
30 years, Mary Annie Coleman Brown; his children Billy Ray,
Shane and LeAnne, all of the Oxford area; and two
grandchildren.
Being from Oxford, Mr. Brown was frequently compared to
Faulkner. But his prose was direct and simple - perhaps
better compared to Carver or Hemingway
- as in the opening of "Fay," based on a character that first
appears in
"Joe."
"She came down out of the hills that were growing black with
night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken
stones that made her wince," he wrote. "Alone for the first
time in the world and full dark coming quickly. House lights
winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse
from her hand. She could hear cars passing down the asphalt
but she was still a long way from that. More than once she
stopped and looked back up into the ridges that stood behind
her, thinking things over, but each time she shook her head
and went on."
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