BROWN, Rosellen

Born 12 May 1939, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Daughter of David H. and Blossom Lieberman Brown; married Marvin Hoffman, 1963; children: Adina, Elana

In "A Fragment of Autobiography," Rosellen Brown recounts her first memories of writing while her older brother was at school. It was during World War II and her memories include air raid drills, ration books, and "terrifying thunder." Even before she learned to write, Brown practiced letters imagining a story to suit her mood. She also remembers early reading, and her grade school librarian's policy of having children "sell" books they enjoyed to other classmates. Reading and writing focused much of her childhood, and Brown has said that she felt, even as a child, the need to "replenish, just a little bit, the pool of words I'm drinking from, to give back a book or two."

Both her parents respected learning. Her mother, who mastered English in a few months after arriving from the Ukraine, became a teacher for other immigrants, and Brown says that she was a "natural poet" even though she never wrote a word. Her father supplemented his eighth grade education by voracious reading and writing. He sold many of his poems to New York newspapers and wrote articulate and sensible letters to the editor. His reading journals, Brown says, were monuments to a writing talent he could not pursue while supporting his family.

Despite the seeming security in the family, Brown felt keenly her rootless childhood, moving from town to town for her father's job. When she was nine, they moved to Los Angeles, where Brown was frightened, lonely, and depressed. To compensate, she turned to writing. Brown remembers herself as obnoxious in her self-advertisement, but she wrote and imagined, even at age nine and with no women's movement, that she could combine marriage and family with writing.

During her years at Barnard (B.A., 1960) Brown wrote and worked with Robert Pack and George P. Elliot, who encouraged her talent, and Pack obtained a place for her in the Cummington Writers' workshop. She published her first poem, a sestina, in Poetry magazine when she was a senior in college.

Brown's marriage in 1963 initiated a return to the rootless life she had known as a child. She and her husband lived first in California, then in Mississippi, the setting for Civil Wars (1984), and subsequently in Boston, in Brooklyn, the neighborhood of her book of short stories, Street Games (1974, 1991), in New Hampshire, and finally in Houston, where she taught creative writing at the University of Houston. Of her constant relocation, both as a child and as an adult, she comments that it has given the theme of exile to her writing. She says this exile "can be just as deep an obsession as devotion to (or aversion to) home": the theme is seen in almost all of her work—poetry, short stories, and novels.

Brown's first novel, Autobiography of My Mother (1976), pits two women against one another. The mother, Gerda Stein, is a successful civil rights lawyer; her daughter, Renata, has become a flower child and has a baby out of wedlock. The two women not only represent poles of the political spectrum, but they also show readers how far apart and how hurtful mothers and daughters can be to each other.

Tender Mercies (1978), the story of a young woman paralyzed in a boating accident caused by her husband, again rubs raw the nerve connecting people. The marriage of Dan Courser and Laura tests the strength of both and illustrates how people survive after they have committed monumental acts of carelessness.

Civil Wars (1984), perhaps Brown's most ambitious novel, combines political and personal themes and explores the public and private histories of a group of civil rights workers in Mississippi. Jessie and Teddy Carll are two 1960s liberals trying to survive and to keep their marriage together when the raison d'être of their lives, the civil rights movement, seems no longer to exist. The book is about families and about the politics that bring them together and drive them apart.

Before and After (1992) again makes use of a 1960s liberal couple: Ben, who is a sculptor, works at home and does the cooking; Carolyn, his wife, practices medicine in a small New Hampshire town. Both are trying to live without losing the aura that the 1960s brought to their lives. When their teenaged son, Jacob, murders his girlfriend, the family must begin the long journey to reconstitute itself with this enormous burden. Like Tender Mercies, Before and After tears people's lives apart and examines how the characters mend themselves. The novel has been translated into 23 languages, and a film version (with screenplay by Ted Tally) was released in 1996 that greatly distorted both the plot and the intercultural conflict driving it.

In her two books of poetry, Some Deaths in the Delta (1970) and Cora Fry (1977), Brown again combines public politics and private dreams. Some Deaths is a series of trenchantly critical poems about the new South, and the tone often foreshadows Civil Wars. Cora Fry, a series of narrative poems about marriage and family, reveals the ways in which personal relationships recapitulate larger social forces. Cora, wanting only freedom, runs away with her children, but returns to her marriage and the risk that her husband may well destroy them all.

Brown also collaborated on the Whole World Catalogue, a compendium of creative writing ideas for elementary and secondary schools. Here, as in her fiction, she replenishes the pool of words.

In 1994 Brown continued to replenish the supply of her well-wrought words with Cora Fry's Pillow Book, which includes Cora Fry and the sequel of the title. With elegant brevity, Brown continues the tale of Cora's life in smalltown New England as well as that of her neighbors, packing rich imagery and deep emotion into very few words.

In 1996 Brown moved from Houston to Chicago, where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is at work on a new novel. She reviews for the Women's Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the New Leader, and the American Book Review. An occasional travel piece appears in the New York Times as well and she has contributed to a number of anthologies, including A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1997), Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (edited by Kate Bernheimer, 1998), and From Daughters to Mothers: I Always Meant to Tell You (edited by Constance Warhoe, 1998), an anthology of letters from 75 writers to their mothers. John Updike has selected her superbly wry and painful short story "How to Win" for a volume tentatively titled The Best Short Stories of the Century.

Other Works:

A Rosellen Brown Reader (1992).

Bibliography:

Howe, F., ed., Meridian, The Salt Eaters, Civil Wars (1991). Howe, F., ed., Tradition and the Talents of Women (1991). LeClair, T., and L. McCaffery, Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983). Pearlman, M., ed., Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature (1989).

Reference Works:

CA (1979). CAAS (1989). CANR (1985). CLC (1985). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other reference:

American Imago (Summer 1988). Chicago Review (Winter 1983). Contemporary Literature (Summer 1986). South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1991). WRB (July 1989).

—MARY A. MCCAY

UPDATED BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST