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Profile written by M. Dale Jones
His
work evokes the sounds, smells and sensations of the land, people
and world of the rough south. No parlors or doilies, no society
dances or church picnics, Larry Brown wrote of the events, troubles
and hopes of everyday people whose world is fatally realistic. It
was his world he evoked and reflected through a mirror of
discernment, care and empathy. Larry Brown wrote fiction with flesh
and muscle - that breathes deep and sweats. Life lived in his
fiction, and that life began in 1951 in Oxford, Mississippi as one
of six children. His father relocated the family when Larry was
only three to Memphis, Tennessee to work in at the Fruehauf Trailer
Company. They returned to Oxford in 1964 where they were to
remain. At the pivotal age of sixteen, his father died. Larry did
not fare well in school and joked ironically in later years that he
flunked senior English.
During
the Vietnam war era, October 1970, Brown joined the U.S. Marine
Corps, but was stationed at Camp LeJune and never saw action. This
experience and the people he meet while in the Marines became the
rare material of his first novel, Dirty Work. After his term
in the Marines was over, Brown returned to Oxford and married Mary
Annie Coleman and became a Firefighter (experiences that were
memorialized in On Fire).
While
working as a Firefighter in 1980, Brown began teaching himself how
to write fiction. He had worked for the Fire Department for seven
years and knew that he did not want to do this for the rest of his
life. He intuitively knew that learning to write was work and that
if he worked hard enough at it he could learn to write well. And so
he wrote five novels and between eighty and ninety stories (eight
years of writing) before he published his first book. During this
literary apprenticeship, of an auto-didactic nature, Brown read
writers William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Cormac
McCarthy, and Raymond Carver.
What
happened next is the stuff of legend around the Algonquin Books of
Chapel Hill. Shannon Ravel read of story of Brown's while looking
for new material for her New Stories from the South. She loved what
she saw ("Facing the Music" the second story Brown had published)
and wrote Brown to see if he had any more stories, he replied about
a hundred. His first collection of stories was published, Facing
the Music, was published in 1988
Brown’s
first novel, Dirty Work (1989) about the struggles of two
injured veterans won the Mississippi Library Association's Award for
Fiction. It was followed by a collection of short stories Big Bad
Love (1990) depicting the struggles and tensions between holding
onto relationships (husband, wife, and friendships) and being true
to yourself (particularly while dedicating the time, energy and
focus necessary to be writer.) In 2001, Arliss Howard directed a
screenplay adaptation of Big Bad Love written by Jim Howard
where he played the role of Leon Barlow with Debra Winger
co-starring as his ex-wife, Marilyn. Brown appears in the film in
the role of Mr. Barlow, father of Leon, uttering his words of wisdom
to his son, “Take the high road son.”
His
next novel, Joe: A Novel (1991), a story of redemption and
ruin as two unlikely characters discovery and fulfill a shared need
in each other, won the Southern Book Critic's Circle Award for
Fiction, was named a Notable Book of 1991 by the American Library
Association, and was a Best Book by Publisher's Weekly. Joe
(named for Joe Ransom) introduces readers to the Jones family, Ward
(the father), Gary, Fay, Calvin and Dorothy and is the first in a
proposed trilogy that was to include novels on Fay and Gary and
resolve the questions about the fates of Fay, Gary and Calvin.
Brown’s
third novel, Father and Son: A Novel (1996), won the 1997
Southern Book Award. Here Brown addresses the core questions in the
struggle between good and evil without either falling into cliques
or simplifying the complex motives and drives of each character.
As in his other fiction, characters are portrayed at their most
vulnerable or base, in full light of their weaknesses and make their
way, for better or worse, toward their fate.
In
2000, Brown released Fay: A Novel, the second installment of
his proposed trilogy. It takes up the questions left open in Joe
regarding the fate of Fay Jones. Writing in the first person in the
voice of Fay, this novel records her life from immediately after she
had fled from the sexual advances of her father, Wade, a man who had
traded his son Calvin for a car and pimped his youngest mute
daughter for a few $20s. Not since Faulkner’s Light in August
has a narrative struggle of a young woman reached this epic
proportion. In recognition of his accomplishments he received the
Artist's Achievement Award given by the Governor's Awards for
Excellence in the Arts.
Brown
changed publishers for his novel Rabbit Factory: A Novel in
2003 from Algonquin to Free Press. In many ways Rabbit Factory
reminds one of the stories in Big Bad Love with the
significant difference that Brown has successfully woven these
stories of broken, self-destructive, long-time losers in and around
Memphis, Tennessee. It is the most sophisticated formal
experimentation with fiction that Brown had yet achieved.
Experience and proximity are glue that holds these stories together
as each character who are self-absorbed in their lives were violence
is as familiar as their own face. In these stories, the main
character is the absurdity of each thought and action as played out
in a world in which it appears normal; in which the absurdity of a
reformed, thoughtful pit bull setting out to become helpful to other
animals makes equal sense.
On Fire
(1993) and Billy Ray's Farm: Essays from a place called Tula
(2001), together gather Brown’s published non-fiction prose. Each
draws from his life and interaction with the people, places and
animals he cared about most. They provide the most vivid written
portrait of Brown available. This portrait was enhanced in 2002,
when director Gary Hawkings made a documentary, "The Rough South of
Larry Brown" that dramatized some of Brown's stories, including "Boy
& Dog" and featured an interview with both Brown and his wife, Mary
Annie.
Larry
Brown died tragically on November 24, 2004 at his own near Oxford,
from a heart attack.
Those surviving him
include his wife, Mary Annie Coleman Brown, three children (Billy
Ray, Shane Michael, and LeAnn), and two granddaughters. His lose is
deeply felt by the literary community and by readers who eagerly
awaited each new volume. His example of a self-made literary giant
stands tall for all who would learn from him the lesson of hard work
and perseverance on the path to becoming a writer.
His last novel, A
Miracle of Catfish, will be published by Algonquin on March 20,
2007. It contains all chapters that Brown finished plus the notes
for its conclusion. The novel recounts the story of Cortez Sharp, a
widower, who decides to build a catfish pond on his land in
Mississippi and that of a young nine-year-old boy, Jimmy, who lives
down the road. You will have to read his book or upcoming reviews
to find out more.
Another significant
addition to the Brown corpus will be the collection of interviews
edited by Jay Watson, Conversations with Larry Brown to be
published by the University of Mississippi Press in March of 2007.
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