The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown ― A Real-life Zelig Who Wrote His Way Through the 20th Century

There is scarcely an element of modern American high or low culture, especially when it involves publishing, book design, media, reading machines, or writing, that does not owe a portion of what it is today to an unsung hero, who worked in the shadows of cultural industries and avant-garde celebrities during the entire first half of the twentieth century. They were known as The Browns. The Brown clan: husband Bob, wife Rose, and Bob's mother Cora, were authors independently and a creative team who sometimes went by the name of CoRoBo. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Bob Brown turned up in the midst of virtually every significant literary, artistic, political, and popular or counter-cultural movement in America, from Chicago's Cliff Dweller's Club to Greenwich Village bohemians and the Imagist poets, through the American vanguard expatriate groups in Europe to the WPA writers to Hollywood writers to the Beat poets. From the invention of serialized movies, to avant-garde poetry, to the invention of a reading machine, to writing populist cookbooks, Brown created and celebrated twentieth-century culture of all kinds. While interest in Bob Brown has been growing, and some academic studies touch on his work, this book takes a much broader approach to a biographical study, following Bob, and the Brown clan through globe-trotting, fortune-making and fortune-spending, culture-creating and culture-exploring adventures during the first half of the twentieth-century. One of the profound lessons of their careers, and a major theme of this story, seems prescient now when texts are discussed as multimodal, and types of reading machines multiply regularly. The Browns works demonstrated, more than fifty years ahead of their time, that the visual design and media that deliver texts are not separate from the literary messages and meanings delivered.

Craig Saper is Professor in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC.