Release date:
June 13, 2023
ISBN:
979-8987574324
118 pages
Cover art:
Bobby Sengstacke
Frank London Brown was one of the most important voices in Black Chicago literature, whose 1959 book Trumbull Park is a vital portrait of segregation in the North. He died of leukemia in 1962 at the age of 34. Between November 1959 and November 1960, he wrote “This Is Life,” a series of very short stories (most of them around 200 words) for the Chicago Defender. These poignant, vibrant vignettes observed episodes of Black life in Chicago in Brown’s trenchant style. These stories were then forgotten—they’ve fallen out of copyright and have never been collected, and even Brown’s family were unaware of their existence. We’ve discovered almost 130 of them, and with the blessing of Brown’s family, we’re publishing them as a collection.
Introduction by Sandra Jackson-Opoku, the award-winning author of The River Where Blood Is Born; afterword by poet Nile Lansana.
Frank London Brown (1927-1962) was a novelist, union organizer, journalist, singer, father, and husband. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Brown moved at the age of 12 with his family to Chicago. He attended DuSable High School and Roosevelt University, and he received his Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, where he worked toward a Ph.D. in the Committee on Social Thought. As a journalist, he wrote for numerous newspapers and journals, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Ebony, Chicago Tribune, Negro Digest, and Chicago Defender. It was at the Defender that he gained nationwide recognition through his coverage of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi. Fervently progressive, Brown also worked as a union organizer and was active in the Civil Rights Movement. A major voice in Chicago’s Black Renaissance, he made his literary reputation with the 1959 publication of his semi-autobiographical first novel Trumbull Park, which remains the best literary portrait of Northern segregation. His death in 1962 cut short what would have been a stellar literary career, a fact underscored by his posthumously published second novel The Myth Maker in 1969.
More Praise for This Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction
“One of Chicago’s most compelling, if undersung, writers, is one step closer to getting his due with This Is Life. Brown’s sketches offer us small windows into taut moments of living that are, at turns, uproarious and tender and, at others, melancholic and even brutal—but always poetically grounded in the rich texture of experience. The ordinary blends into the extraordinary and back again as Brown provides his readers poignant peeks into the ironies and marvels of being alive.” —Adrienne Brown, Associate Professor of English and Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago
