Brown was born in
Portland, Maine. He attended
Harvard University where he befriended American poet
Robert Lowell. In 1940,
New Directions issued Brown's first poetry collection,
The End of a Decade. The following year,
Charles Scribner's Sons published his documentary-style epic,
The Poem of Bunker Hill. The 158-page stanzaic verse about the
Battle of Bunker Hill in the
American Revolutionary War won praise for its poetic skill and its timely presentation of a vital topic: young men at war. Louise Bogan from
The New Yorker wrote that Brown exhibited "from the first, all the signs of virtuosity." In 1944, Brown completed a
WWII novel,
A Walk in the Sun, about an infantry outfit fighting in Italy. His successful novel was quickly made into a
film of the same name. The film's director
Lewis Milestone encouraged Brown to come to
Hollywood and work as a
screenwriter. He did so and contributed to numerous films including
Wake of the Red Witch (1948) and
Sands of Iwo Jima (
1949) both starring
John Wayne;
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) starring
James Cagney;
A Place in the Sun (
1951) (won a
Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar) with
Elizabeth Taylor and
Montgomery Clift;
Eight Iron Men (1952); and ''
Ocean's 11 (1960) starring the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop). When Ocean's 11
was remade in 2001, Brown was credited for his work on the original. The film El Dorado'' (1966), with
John Wayne,
Robert Mitchum and
James Caan, was loosely based on Brown's novel
The Stars in Their Courses (1960) about a murderous feud in southern Colorado in the 1870s. In the early 1960s, Brown and his wife moved to
Guanajuato, Mexico, where they lived for 15 years. ==Awards==