Millen Brand

Millen Brand (January 19, 1906 – March 19, 1980) was an American writer and poet. His novels, The Outward Room (1938) and Savage Sleep (1968), addressed mental health institutions and were bestsellers in their day.[1]

Millen Brand
Brand in the 1930s
Born(1906-01-19)January 19, 1906
Jersey City, New Jersey
DiedMarch 19, 1980(1980-03-19) (aged 74)
OccupationNovelist, poet
ResidenceNew York City
Alma materColumbia University
Notable worksThe Outward Room, Savage Sleep, Local Lives
Years active50
SpousePauline Leader, Helen Mendelssohn
Children4

Private life

Brand was born on January 19, 1906, in Jersey City, New Jersey, into a working-class family. He was of Pennsylvania Dutch descent on his mother’s side. He graduated from Columbia University in 1929.[2] He resided in Greenwich Village[3] and on a small farm in Bally, Pennsylvania.[4][5] He married twice; first to Pauline Leader, a poet noted for her memoir about growing up deaf, And No Birds Sing,[6] and then to Helen Mendelssohn; both marriages ended in divorce. He had three children by his first marriage and one by his second.[3]

Career

After graduating from Columbia, Brand began work as a psychiatric aide and also a copywriter for the New York Telephone Company before accepting faculty posts at the University of New Hampshire and New York University, where he taught writing fiction. Brand was an editor at Crown Publishers for about twenty years, starting in the early 1950s, where he edited works by Indian social-realist novelist Bhabani Bhattacharya.[7][2]

In 1935, Brand joined the League of American Writers (1935-1943), whose members included Alexander Trachtenberg, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I.F. Stone, Myra Page, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett.[8] Members were sympathetic to the U.S. Communist Party.[9]

In 1937, Brand wrote his first and most noted novel, The Outward Room, based in part on his experience as a psychiatric aide. The novel was a bestseller and was adapted for Broadway as The World We Make.[2] He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing (Screenplay) in 1948 for The Snake Pit (with Frank Partos), an adaptation of Mary Jane Ward's novel, which like his novel, The Outward Room, involved confinement in a mental health institution.[3]

Brand described the Pennsylvania Dutch culture in Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970)—with photography by George Tice—and in Local Lives (1975), a book of poems about his Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors, compiled over the span of his working life.[5]

Activism

Brand was active in the peace movement.[3] Toward the end of his life, he was active in a movement to open up major poetry publications to writers of color and younger writers, through his friendship with the Caribbean-American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist, June Jordan.[10]

In 1953, Brand was required to appear before the U.S. Senate Investigations subcommittee, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, at which appearance he refused to testify against his colleagues in the League of American Writers, citing the Fifth Amendment. Consequently, his works were among those banned from U.S. State Department libraries, abroad.[3]

Bibliography
  • Brand, Millen (1937). The Outward Room. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781590173596.
  • Brand, Millen (1939). The Heroes. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Brand, Millen (1947). Albert Sears. New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Brand, Millen (1959). Some love, some hunger. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers.
  • Brand, Millen (1968). Savage Sleep. New York: Crown Publishers.
  • Brand, Millen (1970). Fields of Peace: a Pennsylvania German Album. Boston: David R. Godine Publisher. ISBN 9781567920765.
  • Brand, Millen (1975). Local lives. New York: C. N. Potter.
  • Brand, Millen (1980). Peace march, Nagasaki to Hiroshima. Woodstock, Vermont: Countryman Press. ISBN 9780914378648. Millen Brand Peace March: Nagasaki to Hiroshima.
gollark: People like having more things.
gollark: There are people trying to remove "master/slave" and "blacklist/whitelist" terminology from some programming projects and documentation, which seems really stupid.
gollark: There was someone on Twitter saying that one of the things they needed badly was *phone chargers*.
gollark: Stuff doesn't exactly grow very *fast*, either.
gollark: Exotic political compasses: https://twitter.com/virgil_30/status/1270791101989957637

References
  1. Curators. "Millen Brand papers, 1919-1976". Columbia University. Retrieved 2019-04-26.
  2. Staff (1980). "Millen Brand". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 29 November 2016.
  3. Pace, Eric (March 22, 1980). "Millen Brand, Writer and Editor Known for Works on Psychiatry; Co-Author of 'Snake Pit' Film Plans Aborted". The New York Times. Retrieved 2019-04-25.
  4. Staff. "Millen Brand". David R. Godine, Publisher. Retrieved 2019-07-30.
  5. Brand, Millen (1970). Fields of Peace: a Pennsylvania German Album. David R. Godine Publisher. ISBN 9781567920765.
  6. Brand, Millen (2010-10-19). The Outward Room. New York Review of Books. ISBN 9781590174074.
  7. Jain, Saudamini. "The long history of Indians in the US, as told by a portrait of an anonymous woman". Quartz India. Retrieved 2019-04-24.
  8. Page, Myra; Baker, Christina Looper (1996). In a Generous Spirit: A First-Person Biography of Myra Page. University of Illinois Press. p. 145. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
  9. Earl Browder, "Text of Speech by Browder at American Writers Congress," The Daily Worker, vol. 12, no. 102 (April 29, 1935), pg. 3.
  10. Jordan, June (July 1975). "Millen Brand Critical Essays". The American Poetry Review. Retrieved 2019-04-26.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.