Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life. At the age of thirty, a captain in the Oxford Fire Department, he decided to become a writer and worked toward that goal for seven years before publishing his first book, Facing the Music, a collection of stories, in 1988. With the publication of his first novel, Dirty Work, he quit the fire station in order to write full time. (The nonfiction book On Fire tells the story of his many years as a firefighter.) Between then and his untimely death in 2004, he published seven more books. He was awarded the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award for fiction and was the first two-time winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction, which he won in 1992 for Joe, and again in 1997 for Father and Son. He was the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award and Mississippi’s Governor’s Award For Excellence in the Arts. The story “Big Bad Love” became the basis for a feature film, as did his novel Joe.

Praise for Larry Brown

“Larry Brown writes like a force of nature. Everything he writes seems lived in, authentic, and on the money.” —Pat Conroy

“He has an ear for the way people talk, an eye for their habits and manners, a heart for their frailties and foibles, and a love for their struggles and triumphs.” —John Grisham

“He is blunt and abrasive about subjects that tend to cause flinching. He tells stories in plain language.” —The New Yorker

“He knows things … you didn’t think would get found out until Judgment Day.” —Jack Butler

“He is a master.” —Barry Hannah

“[He] writes as if he owns—legitimately and without challenge, mind you—the entire grief-stricken, joy-ridden world, and a few things beyond it.” —Bob Shacochis

“Direct, powerful, and singularly honest.” —Willie Morris

“Clear, simple and powerful.” —Time

Praise for Facing the Music

“A stunning debut.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“One of our finest writers.” —Charles Frazier

“Larry Brown … is a choir of Southern voices, all by himself.” —The Dallas Morning News

“[These] stories manage to touch us in surprisingly potent ways.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Larry has an unerring comic sense, a sensitive ear for talk, an unsentimental commitment to his characters and, above all, the intimate, ruthless, loving connections with the world he writes about that is the hallmark of a good honest writer.” —Ellen Douglas, author of A Family’s Affairs and Can’t Quit You, Baby

“Larry Brown’s work is exceptional by any standard. Talent has struck.” —Harry Crews, author of A Feast of Snakes and Body

“Brown will show you another America—his America—and dare you to try again to forget that it still exists.” —USA Today

Praise for Dirty Work

“An unforgettable, unshakable novel.” —The New York Times Book Review

“One of the most powerful antiwar novels in American literature.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution