Sterling Brown

Who Was Sterling Brown?

Sterling Brown was one of the great literary scholars and poets of the Harlem Renaissance — a figure whose influence on African American literary culture was enormous and whose poetry, grounded in the folk traditions of the rural South, represents one of the most authentic and formally accomplished bodies of work produced by his generation. Born in Washington D.C. to a father who was a professor of religion at Howard University, educated at Williams College and Harvard, he spent most of his academic career at Howard, where he taught for forty years and shaped the education of generations of African American intellectuals.

His first collection, Southern Road (1932), drew on the blues, the work song, the spiritual, and the folk ballad to create a poetry that was rooted in Black vernacular culture without being condescending to it — a poetry that took the speech and the experience of ordinary Black Southerners as material worthy of the highest literary attention. His scholarship — particularly The Negro in American Fiction (1937) and his contributions to the Negro Caravan anthology (1941) — helped establish African American literature as a serious field of academic study.

Brown’s father’s theological training and his own deep familiarity with the spirituals shaped his understanding of the relationship between suffering, endurance, and hope in ways that give his poetry a depth that purely secular readings cannot fully account for.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Southern Road — 1932 — poetry
• The Negro in American Fiction — 1937 — criticism
• Negro Poetry and Drama — 1937 — criticism
• The Negro Caravan — 1941 — anthology, co-edited
• The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown — 1980