Norman O(liver) Brown. Born in El Oro Mexico in 1917. His father was an Irish mining engineer, his mother Cuban. He was educated at Eton, Oxford (BA, MA, Classics his tutor was Isaiah Berlin), and the University of Wisconsin (PhD, Classics). During the second world war, he worked for the OSS. After the war, he took a position as Professor of Classics at Wesleyan University. His initial work in classics betrayed a Marxist bent (his commentary to Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief). Following his disenchantment with real politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he turned to a deep study of the works of Freud, described in his book Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. A synthesis of Freudian and Marxist thinking, with Nietzsche thrown into the mix, can be identified as the origin of his Love's Body, a book which adapted an unorthodox and creative writing style, approaching a language that was as much poetry as prose. In the late 1960's following a brief stay at Rochester University, he moved on to the University of California at Santa Cruz. The range of his interests and studies broadened to include James Joyce (Brown's Closing Time is a brief study of Finnegans Wake), re-encounters with classical poetry and mythology, including scholarly-poetic responses to Propertius, and to Ovid's Metamorphosis, an engagement with American modernist poetry (especially Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky) and a deep study of Islam. Many of his later writings were collected in the anthology Apocolypse and/or Metamorphosis. From his Wesleyan years, Brown had a friendship with John Cage that was fruitful to both the scholar and the composer. Brown died in Santa Cruz in 2002.