Dee Alexander Brown

American · 1908 to 2002

Born Dorris Alexander Brown on February 29, 1908, in the sawmill town of Alberta, Louisiana, he lost his father when he was five and grew up in Ouachita County, Arkansas, before his mother moved the family to Little Rock so her children could attend a better high school. As a young reporter and printer in the Ozark town of Harrison, he was once falsely accused of robbing a bank in nearby Jasper and spent a night in the Newton County jail, only to learn the next morning that his accuser had stolen the tires off his borrowed Model T. He enrolled at Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway, where he met his future wife, Sally Stroud, and worked as a student assistant in the campus library, an experience that turned him toward librarianship. He earned a library science degree from George Washington University in 1935 and took a post as an agriculture librarian with the federal government in Washington, D.C., publishing his first novel, Wave High the Banner, about Davy Crockett, in 1942. In 1948 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as agriculture librarian, a post he held for twenty-four years while writing steadily at night: works of frontier and Civil War history including Grierson's Raid (1954) and Showdown at Little Big Horn (1964). In 1970 he published Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history of the United States government's nineteenth-century campaigns against Native nations told through council records, memoirs, and firsthand Native accounts. The book stayed on bestseller lists for more than a year, sold millions of copies worldwide, and has remained continuously in print ever since. He retired from the university in 1972 and returned to Little Rock, where he kept writing for the rest of his life, including the novel Creek Mary's Blood (1980) and the memoir When the Century Was Young (1993). He died at his home in Little Rock on December 12, 2002, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried in Urbana, Illinois, the town where he had spent his library career.