This collection contains personal, family and business correspondence (mostly incoming) and documents covering the years from Norman O. Brown's arrival in the United States in 1936, to his death in 2002. The bulk of the material covers the time he was affiliated with the University of California at Santa Cruz, as professor and emeritus, ca. 1970-1990. Also included are his working files, card files, teaching related materials, articles and essays used for reference material.

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

73 Linear Feet 73 boxes

Property rights reside with the University of California. Literary rights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. For permission to publish or to reproduce the material, please contact the Head of Special Collections & Archives.

Collection is open for research.