Brammer was born April 21, 1929, in Dallas, Texas, where he graduated from
Sunset High School. He attended the University of North Texas (then called North Texas State College), where he met Nadine Ellen Cannon, and they married on April 22, 1950. Brammer graduated in 1952 with a degree in journalism. After working briefly as a reporter for the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Brammer joined the
American-Statesman (then called the
Austin Statesman), where he won a press award for excellence in writing in 1952. In 1954, he won the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Contest for a feature sports story written for the same paper. In 1955, Brammer became an associate editor of the
Texas Observer, a magazine of liberal dissent at a time when in Texas "the impulse for dissent scarcely existed." He attracted the attention of Texas Senator
Lyndon Baines Johnson, who invited him to join his staff. While employed by Johnson in Washington, D.C., Brammer began working on
The Gay Place, his first and only published novel, which is composed of three related novellas:
The Flea Circus,
Room Enough to Caper, and
Country Pleasures. He sold the book to
Houghton Mifflin in 1959. Brammer left Johnson's staff to work for the economist
Eliot Janeway.
Time hired Brammer in 1960 to cover civil rights issues from the magazine's Atlanta office. Brammer left that job in 1961 (the year of the publication of
The Gay Place) and never again held sustained employment. He began a sequel to
The Gay Place titled "Fustian Days," but it never was completed. He was hired in 1973 as one of the first writers with
Texas Monthly. Brammer had three children – Sidney Gail, Shelby Ellen, and William Raoul – with Nadine before they divorced in 1961. In 1963, Brammer married Dorothy Browne; they were divorced in 1969. Brammer died of a methamphetamine overdose on February 11, 1978. == References ==