Brown, Norman Oliver

▪ 2003

      American philosopher and critic (b. Sept. 25, 1913, El Oro, Mex.—d. Oct. 2, 2002, Santa Cruz, Calif.), was educated in the classics, but his thought drew on psychoanalysis, literature, and other fields. He earned a B.A. degree in 1936 from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. degree in 1942 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A Marxist early in his career, he taught at a number of schools, including the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was best known for the book Life Against Death (1959), history as interpreted through Freudian thought, in which he argued that Western civilization was essentially repressive. A later book, Love's Body (1966), took the same stance, juxtaposing erotic love and civilization. Both works became cult books in the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s.

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