Brown, Norman Oliver, 1913-2002.

Biography

Norman Oliver Brown (1913-2002) was born in El Oro de Hidalgo, Mexico, and raised in England, where he took his B.A. at Balliol College, Oxford, with double First Class Honors in the School of Literae Humaniores (Classical Philology and History). He then came to the United States and continued his studies at the University of Chicago, where he met and married Elizabeth Potter in 1938. His doctorate in classics was earned at the University of Wisconsin (1942) with a dissertation that he subsequently published as Hermes the Thief, which remains a classic of social interpretation of the history of religion. After a year of teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan University, he spent the remaining war years in Washington D.C. as a research analyst with the Office of Strategic Services, working alongside men who would become life-long friends, including Herbert Marcuse and Carl Schorske. There followed a decade and a half at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he eventually chaired the Classics Department. In 1968, Brown came to Santa Cruz with the appropriate title of Professor of Humanities, after a briefer period at the University of Rochester as professor of classics and comparative literature. He held senior fellowships from the Ford and Guggenheim Foundations and from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford

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