While an undergraduate student at Princeton he wrote the songs for the Princeton Triangle Club musical titled Stags at Bay in 1934, including "East of the Sun" (which almost didn't make it into the play due to a copyright dispute).
"[1] He was also president of the Princeton Tower Club during his senior year.
Following his graduation from Princeton with the class of 1936, Bowman moved to California where, in 1937, he briefly worked under contract as a songwriter for Selznick International Pictures.
Released from his contract in September 1937, he returned to the East where he formed a songwriting partnership, in which he would have been the lyricist, with a former Princeton classmate.
A New York music publisher offered the team a contract, but before it was signed Brooks Bowman died on October 17, 1937, when a car in which he was riding[2] crashed into a stone wall on Cat Rock Road near Garrison, New York.