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Best Known As: Author - Nonfiction Gist: Norman Oliver Brown (September 25, 1913, El Oro (municipality), Mexico – October 2, 2002, Santa Cruz, California, United States) was an American classicist. Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin. Brown was educated at Clifton College, then Balliol College, Oxford (BA, MA, Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin), and the University of Wisconsin?Madison (PhD, Classics). In 1938, Brown married Elizabeth Potter. Brown's other friends included the historians Christopher Hill, and Hayden White, and the philosopher Stuart Hampshire. At Wesleyan University, he befriended the composer John Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both. Brown became Professor of Classics at Wesleyan. Brown's commentary on Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth showed a Marxist tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy for President in 1948. Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud. This culminated in his classic 1959 work Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. The book's fame was spread when Norman Podhoretz introduced it to Lionel Trilling. Love's Body, published in 1966, examined "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization." In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, as Professor of Humanities, teaching in the Boards of Studies in History of Consciousness and Literature. Brown was a highly popular professor, known to both friends and students as "Nobby". The range of courses taught by Brown, while broadly focused around the themes of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake, Islam, and, with Carl Schorske, Goethe's Faust. In 1970, Brown was interviewed by Warren Bennis and Sam Keen for Psychology Today. Bennis asked Brown whether he lived out the vision of polymorphous perversity in his books. Brown replied that, "....I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity." Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, was an anthology that collected many of Brown's later writings. It contained Dionysus in 1990, an article in which Brown used the work of Georges Bataille, whom he described as a "fellow traveler on the Dionysian path", to try to develop a post-Marxist critique of political economy.  read more about Norman O. Brown
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