author
Bob Brown
1886–1959
A restless, shape-shifting American man of letters, he wrote everything from pulp fiction and journalism to cookbooks and avant-garde experiments. His work moves easily between popular culture and literary modernism, which makes him a fascinating figure to rediscover.
1 Audiobook
The Complete Book of Cheese
by Bob Brown
About the author
Bob Brown, born Robert Carlton Brown in Chicago in 1886, was an American writer, editor, publisher, and traveler whose career refused to stay in one lane. He produced fiction, poetry, journalism, advertising copy, political writing, and cookbooks, and he became known for moving between mass-market writing and more experimental literary scenes.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, he wrote prolifically for magazines and newspapers in New York and published works including What Happened to Mary? and The Remarkable Adventures of Christopher Poe. He was also associated with modernist and avant-garde circles, and later became especially noted for The Readies, a forward-looking work that imagined new ways of reading shaped by technology.
Brown's life and work have attracted renewed interest because he seems to anticipate so many later developments in media and literary culture. He remains an unusual and lively figure in American letters: inventive, hard to categorize, and always trying something new.