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Sterling A. Brown
After graduating with a Harvard M.A. in 1923, Sterling A. Brown went south, as he said, to learn something of his people. There a whole new world of black experience opened up to his acute and sensitive artistic vision, causing in him not just a geographical realignment from north to south but the profound shaping of a folk-based aesthetic. At Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg (192326), where the precocious twenty-three-year-old instructor played red-ink man in English classes, the teacher by day became student at night as seminarians introduced him to Calvin Big Boy Davis, itinerate guitar player, and Mrs. Bibby, illiterate, and somehow very wisetwo of the many individuals whose lives, language, and lore Brown would celebrate in memorable literary portraits.
The genteel circumstances of Browns birth would seemingly have mitigated against so complete an absorption of black folk life. He was born into the rather high-brow gentility of Washington, D.C.s, black middle class, to Adelaide Allen and Sterling Nelson Brown, a famous pastor, theologian, and social activist who numbered John Mercer Langston and Blanche K. Bruce among his friends. Graduating valedictorian from the prestigious Dunbar High School in 1918 earned Brown a scholarship to Williams College, where an essay in 1922, The Comic Spirit in Shakespeare and Molière, and election to Phi Beta Kappa won him a Clark Fellowship to Harvard for graduate work (192223). By the time Brown began a second period of study at Harvard (193132), a marvelous synthesis of formal and folk training had coalesced into an early maturing scholarship and a deeply sensitive creative writing. | |
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