Brown, Sharon

Sharon Osborne Brown (1891-1965), professor of English, was born in Calais, Maine, on March 10, 1891. He graduated from Brown in 1915, served as an assistant in the English Department for a year, then taught at Phillips Academy in Andover, at Oregon State College, and served in the army during World War I, before coming back to Brown in 1923 as assistant professor. He taught Victorian literature, modern poetry, and English composition. He published Poetry of Our Times and Essays of Our Times in 1928, and The Engineer’s Manual of English and Present Tense in 1941. He was promoted to full professor in 1945 and retired in 1961. On a questionnaire about his employment at Brown and other activities, Brown’s reply to the inquiry, “What other services do you perform for the community that might be considered worthy of mention?” was a terse “Well, I have spent a lifetime trying, in the classroom, to make civilized and cultured citizens for the community.” His last work was to edit an anthology, Two Centuries of Brown Verse, as a bicentennial publication. The work was mostly his, although he turned it over to others in the last year before his death in Providence on December 17, 1965.