When the Century Was Young

In this graceful memoir, Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , offers quiet, warmhearted anecdotes about his youth in the South and his early evolution as a writer. Born in 1908, he was five when his family moved to Stephens, Ala. It was a quiet town, but by the time Brown was 12, the discovery of oil had turned Stephens into a haven for flimflam artists whom he learned to ape. His schoolteacher grandmother, however, so pricked his taste for print, that young Dee scraped together $25 to buy a hand printing press. Almost inevitably, it seems, he began to write, selling his first adventure story at 17. He learned journalism at a small-town Arkansas paper a year later, and, after acquiring his passion for the West from his favorite professor at Arkansas State Teachers College, he wrote his first western in 1942. The memoir ends in the '50s, thereby missing Brown's mature writing career, which is mentioned only in an epilogue. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)