When the Century Was Young
A Writer's Notebook
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The insightful and heartwarming memoir of one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated frontier writers
Dee Brown’s fascinating memoir describes a writer’s evolution—and a time when catching rides on trains or seeing the landing of a Curtiss Jenny airplane were simple and profound pleasures. Brown traces his upbringing in Arkansas in the early 1900s, and the oil boom that hit his tiny town. He writes of how he fell under the spell of books and history, and of his eventual work as a journalist and printer before finding his true love—the American West—which would lead to his penning the classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Written with gentle humor and a scholar’s curiosity, When the Century Was Young is a wistful look at youth during a poignant moment in American history. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this graceful memoir, Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , offers quiet, warmhearted anecdotes about his youth in the South and his early evolution as a writer. Born in 1908, he was five when his family moved to Stephens, Ala. It was a quiet town, but by the time Brown was 12, the discovery of oil had turned Stephens into a haven for flimflam artists whom he learned to ape. His schoolteacher grandmother, however, so pricked his taste for print, that young Dee scraped together $25 to buy a hand printing press. Almost inevitably, it seems, he began to write, selling his first adventure story at 17. He learned journalism at a small-town Arkansas paper a year later, and, after acquiring his passion for the West from his favorite professor at Arkansas State Teachers College, he wrote his first western in 1942. The memoir ends in the '50s, thereby missing Brown's mature writing career, which is mentioned only in an epilogue. Photos not seen by PW.
