Robert Carlton Brown II (June 14, 1886 – August 7, 1959) was an American writer and publisher in many forms from comic squibs to magazine fiction to advertising to avant-garde poetry to business news to cookbooks to political tracts to novelized memoirs to parodies and much more.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Brown was a bestselling fiction writer and found great commercial success selling his stories to magazines, as well as novelizations of serialized magazines stories, including What Happened to Mary (1913) and The Remarkable Adventures of Christopher Poe (1913).
As part of his work with The Masses, Brown also became a fund-raising impresario staging balls and costume parties at Webster Hall.
Later they eventually made their way to Brazil where they started an international business news publishing empire.
In 1928, they located to Europe to join the expatriate avant-garde group in France, which included Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, and Nancy Cunard.
They wrote over twenty cookbooks, such as Cooking with Wine (1934), 10,000 Snacks (1934), and The Complete Book of Cheese (1955).
The Browns simultaneously worked on a commune, and joined the faculty at the radical Commonwealth College; Bob also helped start the Writer’s Guild and organized summer writing trips to the Soviet Union.
In the 1940s, after Cora died, Bob and Rose became writers in Hollywood; they wrote numerous story treatments for the movie industry, and used advances and fees to fund travel to the Amazon.
They published a colorful memoir about their travels and collected artifacts, which they later donated to museums in Brazil and the United States (in Los Angeles).
They eventually moved back to Brazil in the mid-1940s, and Rose published a few young adult history books.
In his manifesto to The Readies, Bob Brown wrote, "The written word hasn't kept up with the age .
[1] In his monograph Black Riders, Jerome McGann refers to him as "the visual tradition's most important modernist practitioner and theorist".
[2] Scholars Craig Dworkin and Michael North have also situated Brown's work in relation to the traditions of experimental poetry and photography and cinema respectively.
With this global collective in place, the small press started to reprint a number of Brown's most experimental works from the 1930s, including The Readies, Words, Gems: A Censored Anthology, 1450-1950, and Houdini.
The press also offered selected publications for free download on their website and has been noted for its advocacy for open access.
Bob Brown's Reading Machine: Abbreviated Writing and Browsers Fifty Years Before Txt, Tweets, and WWW" (Introduction).
“Saudades on the Amazon: Toward a Soft Sweet Name for Involution.” Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds In Media, Art and Social Practices.