Brown Study: Correcting Some of the Biographical Details on Fredric Brown

I looked into the biographical information on Fredric Brown over the weekend and found a lot of it was wrong.  So I thought I would go over some of it here.  It strikes me that "Brownie," to use his high school nickname (though in fact he was blond), was one of the was one of the most important mid-century noirists or hard-boiled writers.  Much of his work is back in print again, but he still seems not to get quite the credit he should.  

The hard-boiled triumvirate of Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald seems, after a half-century or more, inviolable, while in noir Highsmith, Goodis and Thompson seem to be more the thing with critics.  Woolrich too, though some critics like Julian Symons hated Cornell.  Symons doesn't even deign to mention Brown in his idiosyncratic survey Bloody Murder, even in the last edition, from 1992, after some of Brown's books had been reprinted.  

Fredric Brown may be too plot-driven for critics to take seriously and perhaps he has too many alcoholic loser protagonists for mass appeal.  Raymond Chandler thought the hard-boiled fiction which he wrote was more "realistic" than the genteel English and American variety, but the truth is hard-boiled fiction is just like a lot of genre wish-fulfillment fiction; it's just promulgating a different sort of fantasy.  Instead of poisoned tea at the vicarage, it's shootouts in the back alleys; but the latter is, if anything, more far removed from the lives of a lot of average middle-class mystery readers.  Certainly it is from mine.  I've sipped tea in polite company, while the only hoodlum I ever "met," to my knowledge, was once when I was serving jury duty.  

Brown's Senior Class photo (Class of '25)

I think people--more often men--who read hard-boiled fiction identify with the tough-guy protagonists.  Brown and for that matter Woolrich bros are a little too neurotic for mass appeal.  Even a lot of the noir anti-heroes are often tough guys.  They may be twisted murderers but they impose their will on others, at least for a time. (Often they meet their fatal matches in those mystic dames known as femme fatales.)  Brown's and Woolrich's men more often seem to be losers on the run, at least in my experience.  These authors identified with victims, Highsmith and Thompson with victimizers.  At least that's the theory running through my head at the moment.  

We all know about the tough life, to some extent self-imposed, that Woolrich had, but what about our Brownie?  Like Woolrich, who was less than three years his elder, Brown was an only child.  He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, two days before Halloween in 1906, meaning that as I write this that his 118th birthday is fewer than 24 hours away.  If he were alive today, he would be the world's oldest person, beating out Tomiko Itooka of Japan, a mere child of 116.  

A conveniently located biographical page for Brown at the Ohio Center for the Book--his wikipedia page is rather inadequate--obviously draws on Jack Saybrook's interesting thirty-year-old critical study of the author, but a lot of the biographical information in it simply is wrong.  

According to his bio Brown's parents were Karl Lewis Brown, a newspaperman, and Emma Amelia Graham; and he grew up in Cincinnati.  His mother died in 1920, when he was 14, and his father died the next year when he was 15.  Brown supposedly resided with a family friend until he graduated from high school in 1922 at the age of 15.  

He had an uncle in Oxford, Ohio who helped him out as his guardian and he worked until 1924 as an office boy in a "machine tool jobbing firm" until 1924.  Supposedly in 1927 he attended single semesters at Hanover College in Indiana and the University of Cincinnati.  

In 1929 he married Helen Ruth Brown, a woman to whom he may have been distantly related, ostensibly after, lonelyhearts like, only ever having corresponded with her.  

In 1930 the newlywed couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Brown worked as a proofreader and typesetter for the Journal.  It would be close to the end of the decade before he started placing stories in the pulps, leading to an explosion of productivity in the Forties and Fifties, though Brown would essentially be played out by the mid-Sixties.  He lived on until 1972, dying at the age of 65.  

Much of this early life detail is, however, as I have stated flat wrong.  If people relied on written material from Brown for this information, he was not, for whatever reason, being truthful.  

One strange thing is that Fredric Brown actually has quite a prominent grandfather, Waldo Franklin Brown, who died at the age of 75 in 1906, the year after Brownie was born.  It seems odd that he never would have mentioned Waldo.  Like his grandson, Waldo was even a newspaper man, a nationally known progressive agriculturist who edited the farm pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Gazette and frequently published advisory articles under the name "Johnny Plowboy."  

On his father's side Frederic Brown was descended from New England stock going back to Massachusetts into the 1700s, while on his mother's side, he was descended from the Grahams: Presbyterians, surely Scots-Irish, going back to Pennsylvania.  

His mother Emma's grandfather was Reverend Jacob Graham, minister of the gospel at Graham's Chapel in Lodi, a tiny village in rural Ohio.  No relation to the late Reverend Billy Graham of North Carolina as fas I know, though the lines probably intersect somewhere back in Scotland if you go back far enough.  

Great-Grandfather Graham

Fred (let's go to his nick as an adult) apparently later claimed his father was an atheist, as he was himself, so his mother's Graham ancestors would not have been happy with that, and probably his father's ancestors as well.  Grandpa Waldo was a Presbyterian Church elder and Sunday-school superintendent for two decades.  One of Waldo's brothers was a Presbyterian minister.  (I'm guessing the Browns were originally English Puritans.)  

Fred's two sons with his first wife would be baptized within the Presbyterian Church, despite their father's atheism. Maybe his wife insisted.  

Fred stated that he was made to attend church in Cincinnati between the ages of 9 to 14 (1915 to 1920).  He called the "most mixed-up period of my life." 

The Brown house in Newport, Kentucky

This was probably Brownie's bedroom.  The furnishings seems strangely appropriate.

For a few years years the Browns lived across the Ohio River in the small city of Newport, Kentucky (pop. about 30,000) in a narrow two story brick row house on Linden Avenue.  They were living there in 1910, along with Emma's widowed mother, when the census was taken.  Fred's father Karl's occupation was listed as "correspondence clerk."  He was not a newspaperman.

Why did the family move from Cincinnati across the river to Newport in adjacent state?  Well, possibly because Karl landed in hot water in Cincy.  In 1908, when he was a salesman for Gray & Co., a maker of an electroplating apparatus, he was arrested on a warrant sworn by visiting Mexican businessman Benjamin Arboleda, who charged him with obtaining from him a draft for nearly $420 on false pretenses.  I do not know the outcome of this case, but in 1911 Karl was back in Cincinnati and in court again where he testified in a fraud case concerning vacuum cleaner makers R. Armstrong and Company, for whom he worked as bookkeeper.  I'm sensing these firms were on the shady side.  

The Brown house in Cincinnati

Yet Karl seemed to manage despite his brushes with the law, for in 1920 the Browns were still living in Cincinnati, residing in an old but attractive Italianate brick house on Chase street.  Karl was now the manager of the R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company, which now offered machine tools.  

The chronology of events from Fred's life in the Twenties is, to be blunt, screwed-up.  Let's get started on this.  

Fred's mother Emma did not die in 1920, she died in 1923 (apparently from cancer), while his father did not die in 1921, he died in 1926.  These are still untimely deaths, to be sure, at ages 50 and 53 respectively, but why did Fred move the dates up, if that is what he did, to make himself an orphan at age 15?  He actually became an orphan at nearly 20 (still terrible).  His mother died when he was 17.  He says her death caused him to lose his faith in God for good. 

Graham's Chapel

It was Fred's Grandmother Graham who died in 1920, at age 72.  Granted, to lose his whole immediate family--his grandmother, mother and father--at such a young age in the space of six years would have been devastating to most people.  

The dates of Fred's graduation from high school are also wrong.  He did not graduate from high school at the age of 15 in 1922, he graduated three years later, like a normal person, when he was 18.  Nor was he an orphan, his father did not pass away until the next year.  Again, did Fred lie about this, and if so why, to make himself seem like a prodigy?  Or has this just been an error by researchers?  

The "machine tool jobbing firm" with which Fred was employed as an office boy would have been the business his father managed, R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company.  He later wrote a novel drawing on these work experiences: The Office, published in 1958, the same year Cornell Woolrich published his straight novel Hotel Room, which drew on his life.

The Oxford, Ohio uncle was Linn Brown, his father's slightly younger brother, for whom Fred would name his second son in 1932.  It was Linn who worked for a newspaper.  

Oxford was then a small town of some 2000 people about thirty miles north of Cincinnati.  It was where his Grandfather Waldo died and where his father Karl was buried, even though his wife was interred, along with her mother, in Cincinnati.  Was their conflict between his parents?  There does seem a dichotomy between the pious Presbyterian backgrounds and the trips to court to deal with fraud accusations.  Karl was not an "honest farmer" like his father.  

Then there's the matter of Fred's first wife, Helen.  They weren't what I would call distantly related, they were, Poeish-like, second cousins.  Helen's father Thane was Karl's first cousin.  It seems inconceivable that they had never met before their marriage.  When they moved to Milwaukee after the marriage, they lived in 1930 with Helen's family at their attractive gabled, shingled Victorian home.  Thane was a structural works civil engineer, as was his son, Helen's brother.  

Once accounts get into the 1930s things seem to get on surer ground.  But I thought I'd do my bit to straighten out the earlier years.  One thing I haven't found, what the "W" in his name stood for.  Maybe someone else already discovered that.