Larry Brown: A Firefighter Finds His Voice
Larry Brown: A Firefighter Finds His Voice
This chapter discusses the life and work of Larry Brown. Born in 1951, Brown grew up in rural Lafayette County, Mississippi, the land on which William Faulkner based his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. His father, a World War II veteran haunted by memories of combat, worked as a sharecropper, the original occupation shared by Faulkner's Snopes family, notorious for burning barns and other “white trash” transgressions. When Brown was three, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. The family returned to Mississippi when Brown was in his early teens, and his father died a few years later. Working-class characters stand at the center of Brown's fiction, and in works dating from the beginning of his career, they frequently speak in the first-person. This is evident in his first collection, Facing the Music (1988), and in his first novel, Dirty Work (1989). Brown's other works include Joe (1991), Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), The Rabbit Factory (2003), and the posthumously published A Miracle of Catfish (2007).
Keywords: white trash, Larry Brown, Mississippi, Facing the Music, Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, Fay, The Rabbit Factory, A Miracle of Catfish
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