Sterling Brown’s Education
Sterling Allen Brown was born into a black middle-class Washington, D.C. family. His father was a pastor at a local church and a teacher at Howard University’s School of Religion and his mother was a graduate of Fisk University. Brown, though, had other influences in his life. While a student at Dunbar High School, he was taught by writer Jessie Fauset. In 1918, he graduated with honors and received a scholarship to Williams College. After graduating cum laude in 1922, he began attending Harvard University. He received his master’s degree in English in 1923.
Brown’s Work Reflects Rural Black Dialect
Brown decided to forgo an immediate writing career, and instead accepted a teaching position at Virginia Seminary and College. It was during this three-year time in Lynchburg that Brown began studying the dialect of the town’s rural black residents. He spent countless hours with local residents and began listening to blues music and spirituals. These first hand accounts with rural blacks later influenced his use of dialect poetry.In 1929, Brown returned to Washington to teach at Howard University. Besides teaching, he began focusing on writing. His poetry, which was published a few years later, reflected rural black speech patterns. At the time, this was an unpopular style among many black writers who considered it demeaning and often dismissed this type of poetry. However, Brown’s use of the voice of black folk in traditional forms of sonnets, ballads, and villanelle, proved successful in his work Southern Road (1932). Even James Weldon Johnson, a writer and opponent of this style, declared that Brown had successfully replicated rural black dialect.
Brown’s Later Career
Brown’s other important work included The Negro in American Fiction (1937), Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), and The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narratives (1975). Brown was also a contributor to the publications Opportunity, The New Republic, Phylon, and the Journal of Negro Education.Beyond writing, Brown took on an important cause. In the 1930s, he served as editor of Negro affairs for the Roosevelt Federal Writers Project.
In 1969, Brown retired from his position at Howard. He died of leukemia on January 13, 1989.
