Brown, Clarence, 1929-2015

A scholar of modern Russian literature and translation, Clarence Brown (1929-2015) was a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He started at Princeton as an instructor in 1959 and became a professor in 1969, retiring in 1999. Brown first taught courses on Russian language and literature in the Department of Romance Languages and then in the Program in Slavic Languages and Literatures, which became a formal department in 1967. In 1971, he joined the Department of Comparative Literature.

Brown was most known for his scholarship on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (Mandelʹshtam) (1891-1938), which was facilitated by the relationship he formed with Mandelstam's widow and fellow writer, Nadezhda Mandelstam (Mandelʹshtam) (1899-1980), who was invested in preserving her husband's work. The Prose of Osip Mandelstam (1965) was nominated for a National Book Award. Brown's 1973 book Mandelstam earned him the Christian Gauss Award in Literary Criticism. Mandelstam's papers, entrusted by Nadezhda to Brown in 1976, were donated to the Princeton University Library.

Brown earned his bachelor's degree in classics at Duke University in 1950. After graduation, he was drafted and served four years in the Army Security Agency, including a year of intensive training in Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, after which he was sent to Berlin as a German translator. He earned a master's degree in linguistics in 1955 from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and his Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Harvard University in 1962.

A lifelong cartoonist, Brown's work appeared in several publications, including Saturday Review, where he was cartoon editor from 1977 to 1984.