BROWN, Dee (Alexander) 1908-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 28, 1908, near Alberta, LA; died December 12, 2002, in Little Rock, AR. Librarian, historian, educator, and author. Brown was a noted expert on the American West whose writings helped readers see the United States' treatment of Native Americans from the native people's perspective. He received a bachelor's degree in library science from George Washington University in 1937, later going on to earn his master's from the University of Illinois in 1952. His first job was as a library assistant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the late 1930s, followed by a librarianship at the Beltsville Research Center in Maryland. During World War II, Brown served in the U.S. Army, returning home to become a technical librarian for the U.S. War Department in Aberdeen, Maryland. The remainder of his career was spent at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a librarian from 1948 to 1972 and a professor of library science from 1962 to 1975. Brown had been sympathetic to the plight of the American Indian since he was a boy growing up in Oklahoma, where he made many Native-American friends and learned that the Indians portrayed in theaters were not at all like the real people. The stories his grandmother told him about his great-grandfather, a friend to Davy Crockett, also sparked his interest in the Old West. Brown maintained his fascination for the history of the American West into adulthood, and while he worked as a librarian he spent his spare time researching and writing about this period. He discovered that European settlers committed many horrifying injustices against native peoples, including mass slaughters, theft, repeated broken treaties, and unjust relocations of entire tribes. He published his findings in his many history books, the best known of which is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970). Brown also dispelled other myths about the West in such books as The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (1958), The Westerners (1974), and Dee Brown's Civil War Anthology (1998), publishing nineteen nonfiction books in all. He was also the author of nine Western novels, including Wave High the Banner (1942), Kildeer Mountain (1983), and his last, The Way to Bright Star (1998). His writings won several awards, as well, including the Best Western for Young People award in 1981 for Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West and the Saddleman Award in 1984, both from the Western Writers of America.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 6, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

periodicals

Chicago Tribune, December 14, 2002, section 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2002, p. B20.

New York Times, December 14, 2002, p. B18.

Times (London, England), December 17, 2002, p. 28.

Washington Post, December 14, 2002, p. B6.