William Garrott Brown

Born in Marion, Alabama, on April 24, 1868, William Garrott Brown studied at Howard College before continuing at Harvard, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history. He later worked in the Harvard library and university archives, building a career as a historian, biographer, and essayist.

His most productive years came in the early 1900s. During that period he published several books, including Andrew Jackson, Stephen Arnold Douglas, The Life of Oliver Ellsworth, and his best-known collection, The Lower South in American History. He also wrote A History of Alabama, for Use in the Schools and tried fiction once with A Gentleman of the South.

Brown's work often focused on Southern history, politics, and public life, and his papers show that he was engaged with the political debates of his day as well as literary circles. He struggled with worsening deafness and later tuberculosis, and he died in New Canaan, Connecticut, on October 19, 1913.