Sterling Brown
Sterling Brown was born in Washington D.C., on May 1, 1901. He died on January 13, 1989 and the funeral was held in Shreveport, Louisiana. He was the sixth child of a schoolteacher, distinguished theologian and dignity school professor. Brown followed his father's footsteps, attending Williams College on a scholarship. Brown earned his master's in English at Howard University and embarked on a teaching career, heading courses at Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Lincoln University in Missouri and Fisk University in Nashville. His family, and Brown in particular, was criticized as pretentious for being solidly in the black middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century, but while writers of the Harlem Renaissance were rising …show more content…
In Lynchburg, he was exposed to the rural population of the South where he met many colorful characters, such as Calvin "Big Boy" Davis, "Preacher" and "Slim" who influenced his poetry. Brown was popular with his students and he began to invite students to his home to listen to blues and jazz and to read poetry that was not a part of the college’s English curriculum. He married Daisy Turnbull in 1927. Brown began teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1928 and also taught at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri before accepting a position at Howard University as professor English in …show more content…
He grew up in the Washington world of official segregation, which engendered a contradiction between full citizenship and marginalized existence. The son of a distinguished pastor and theologian, Brown graduated with honors from the prestigious Dunbar High School in 1918. The success of Brown's "theory" of folklore is revealed in its implementation. Brown's poetry received its motivation from a need to reveal the humanity that lies below the surface racial stereotypes only skim. There he found qualities erased by racial stereotype: "tonic shrewdness, the ability to take it, and the double-edged humor built up of irony and shrewd observation." Structurally, he made use of, as he said, "the clipped line, the blues form, and the refrain poem." Those folk forms were complemented by his astute experiments with traditional forms, such as the sonnet, villanelle, and ballad. Brown's frequent allusions to Black folk heroes such as John Henry, Stackolee, and Casey Jones also raised ordinary experience to mythic proportions. He went through different trials to persuade people that he was smart to go to school and make his own