Harry Peter McNab Brown Jr. (April 30, 1917 – November 2, 1986)[1] was an American poet, novelist, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
[1] Brown soon branched out into playwriting with A Sound of Hunting, which opened at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway in November 1945 and starred Burt Lancaster and Frank Lovejoy.
[3] The play was later produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Edward Dmytryk under the title Eight Iron Men (1952) with a cast of Bonar Colleano, Lee Marvin, and Arthur Franz.
He did so and contributed to numerous films including Wake of the Red Witch (1948) and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) both starring John Wayne; Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) starring James Cagney; A Place in the Sun (1951) (won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar) with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; Eight Iron Men (1952); and Ocean's 11 (1960) starring the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop).
[5] The film El Dorado (1966), with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and James Caan, was loosely based on Brown's novel The Stars in Their Courses (1960) about a murderous feud in southern Colorado in the 1870s.