Harry Brown

Poet, novelist, and screenwriter Harry Brown was born in Portland, Maine. He attended Harvard for two years, where he befriended poet Robert Lowell. After leaving school, Brown worked at Time magazine and the New Yorker. His first book of poetry, The Poem of Bunker Hill (1941), was a single long poem. It earned Brown accolades from critics such as Louise Bogan, who praised the book for exhibiting “from the first, all the signs of virtuosity.” Brown’s other collections of poetry include The End of a Decade (1940), The Violent: New Poems (1943), and The Beast in His Hunger (1949).
 
Brown enlisted in the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1941, serving in Virginia and joining the staff at Yank magazine. His columns for the magazine were published as Artie Greengroin, Pfc. (1945), the name he wrote under at Yank. Brown’s many novels frequently drew on his experiences during the war; they include A Walk in the Sun (1944, made into the film A Walk in the Sun), The Stars in Their Courses (1960, made into the film El Dorado, with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum), A Quiet Place to Work (1968), and The Wild Hunt (1973). His play, A Sound of Hunting (1946), was first produced on Broadway and later turned into the film Eight Iron Men (1952). Brown also worked on screenplays, including The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), A Place in the Sun (1951), and Ocean’s Eleven (1960). He died in Los Angeles.