Larry Brown
Larry Brown was an American writer who was born and lived in Oxford, Mississippi. Brown wrote fiction and nonfiction. 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. Brown served in the United States Marine Corps 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 in Oxford in 1980.
Brown was awarded the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction. Brown was the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction, which he won in 1992 for his novel, Joe and again in 1997 for his novel Father and Son. In 1998, he received a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, which granted him $35,000 per year for three years to write. In 2000, the State of Mississippi granted him a Governor's Award For Excellence in the Arts. For one semester, Brown taught as a writer-in-residence in the creative writing program at the University of Mississippi, temporarily taking over the position held by his friend Barry Hannah. He later served as visiting writer at the University of Montana in Missoula. He taught briefly at other colleges throughout the United States.
Brown died of an apparent heart attack at his home in the Yocona community, near Oxford, in November 2004.
“We know You love us. We love You, too. I mean, six, seven thousand years from now . . . won't make no difference, will it? Everybody gonna be so mixed up by then that far in the future that they all gonna be the same color by then, ain't they?”
“I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work”
“The boy didn't know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.”
“The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.”
“they had more shit on tv than you could believe now.”
“I can understand why people jump off bridges.”
“After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone.”
“Sunday just came down like a nine-pound hammer ... it was tainted with the closing-in feeling of the loss of freedom. Because after the sun went down, it came back up on Monday morning. And you had to go to work five more days. And it sucked.”
“Don't say what you would or wouldn't do, honey. Cause one day you might have to.”
“I only had one life, and I'd be damned if I'd live it in a way that would make me unhappy and please somebody else. I had already lived that kind of life, too much of it already.”
“If you want to write, you've got to shut yourself up in a room and write.”
“I didn't know why something that started off feeling so good had to wind up feeling so bad. Love was a big word and it covered a lot of territory. You could spend your whole life chasing after it and wind up with nothing, be an old bitter guy with long nose hair and ear hair and no teeth, hanging out in bars, looking for somebody your age, but the chances of success went down then. After a while you got too many strikes against you.”
“You take what you're given, whether it's the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It's all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.”
“I didn't want to see anything worse than me befall her.”