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Brown (Norman O.) Papers
MS.035
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Table of contents
Contributing Institution:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Title: Norman O. Brown Papers
Creator:
Brown, Norman Oliver, 1913-2002
Identifier/Call Number: MS.035
Physical Description:
73 Linear Feet
73 boxes
Date (inclusive): 1938-2002 (Bulk
1968-1990)
Date (bulk): 1968-1990
Abstract: 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.
Physical Location: Stored in Special Collections &
Archives: Advance notice is required for access to the papers.
Language of Material:
English .
Collection is open for research.
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.
Norman O. Brown Papers. MS 35. Special Collections and Archives, University Library,
University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gift of the Brown family, 2004-2006. Additional material via Jerry Neu added in 2012.
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
Norman O. Brown (known as "Nobby" to virtually all who knew him) made his mark in the field
of classics not only with
Hermes but with an edition of Hesiod's
Theogony and memorable interpretive essays on Pindar, on the birth of
Athena, and on Daphne. But no customary academic label can encompass the scope of his
scholarship, creativity, and profound influence on his students and on the reading public.
To suggest something of his quality we extract sentences written to characterize him by
other leaders of the contemporary intellectual world. "Brown is a most unusual scholar,
whose intellectual power is such as to have burst the bonds of traditional discursive
thought and to have found its proper form in a metaphoric language often closer to poetry
than to prose." "Brown's scholarship, his superb technical equipment, has been used to probe
toward the very roots of meaning and organization of culture." "His unique perspective on
matters cultural brings all of our shopworn pieties under doubt." "He is a wayward,
sometimes obscure and perverse, at other times brilliant and penetrating, always poetical
and even rhapsodic writer, whose uniqueness is unquestionable ... a true original and
unusual phenomenon among academics and ... to be greatly cherished."
It was in the early 1950's that Professor Brown found the key to a new vision in the
writings of Sigmund Freud.
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of
History
(1959) brought this vision to a large public in America, and, through
numerous translations, in Europe and Japan. A revolutionary generation of college youth
imbibed from it a heady spirit of inner revolution; in retrospect the book remains one of
the most important essays relating psychoanalysis to cultural history.
Love's
Body
(1966), a more difficult meal for the scholarly world to digest, dealt
aphoristically with central issues of archetypal symbolism.
Closing Time
(1973) evoked a vision of the historical process in the guise of a gloss upon the writings
of James Joyce and Giambattista Vico. Professor Brown was never tame or safely academic; his
polymorphous Orphic or Blakeian vision challenges the rational orderliness of the scholarly
world, which often disagreed with him, even vehemently, but respected and honored him in
disagreement.
At UC Santa Cruz this prophetic figure was a solid and uncommonly responsible citizen of
Cowell College, where he served on the governing committee and in other important
capacities, and on the Academic Senate. In the latter capacity, he contributed loyally to
two of its most important and hard-working committees. He was a central member of the
Committee for the History of Consciousness Program, and also taught for the Boards of
Studies of Literature and History, and for Cowell College. Throughout his career, and indeed
on into retirement, he published essays and articles in a variety of journals and books.
Professor Brown officially retired from UCSC in June of 1981, but continued to occasionally
teach and offer public lectures, including a series of lectures on "The Challenge of Islam"
that he gave both at Oakes College at UCSC and at Tufts University in Massachusetts. In his
quest across disciplinary boundaries for the roots of human meaning, in his championship of
"life against death" in a world that puts life-giving meaning in jeopardy, in his daring
individuality of thought and wide-ranging compass of concern, Professor Brown represented in
his person and works an important aspect of what the University community in Santa Cruz
would like to regard as its distinctive strength.
In 1985 a second addition of
Life Against Death was published by Wesleyan
University Press, with an added introduction by Christopher Lasch. In 1991 the University of
California Press brought out
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, a collection of
his writings spanning 30 years.
Norman O. Brown died at age 89 in Santa Cruz on October 2, 2002 after an extended period of
declining health. A memorial was held two weeks later. Many of the reminiscences given that
day were published in
In Memoriam: Norman O. Brown by New Pacific Press,
2005.
(Some of this text was culled from the program notes for NOB's Faculty Research Lecture
given at UCSC in 1978.)
Scope and Content of Collection
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
from England, 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.
The personal and family correspondence has been arranged by name, while business
correspondence has been arranged chronologically. The working and card files have been left
as close to their original order as possible. Teaching related material has been sorted
chronologically.
Norman O. Brown Papers. Wesleyan University, Middletown, CN
Herbert-Marcuse-Archive. University Library, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
John Cage Collection. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
John Cage Papers, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CN
The books from Norman O. Brown's personal library have been cataloged separately.
Cassettes, tapes, and videotapes have been reformatted and cataloged separately.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Civilization -- Philosophy
Civilization -- Psychological
aspects
Psychoanalysis and culture
Psychoanalysis and religion
Faculty papers
Brown, Norman Oliver, 1913-2002