In the late 60s, Brown lived in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, attending Twin Peaks Elementary School.

[1] From 1980 to 1984, in San Francisco, Brown studied Latin and Greek with a private tutor, reading widely in the works of the ancients and the French as well as contemporary post-war writers like Gore Vidal.

He began publishing book reviews on writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Pepys and Virginia Woolf in newspapers such as the Oakland Tribune.

There, he double-majored in Spanish as well as Translating & Interpreting, completing his undergraduate degree in the CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, headquartered at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

[5] Commissioned in 1993, just after the release of Spike Lee's movie on the same subject, Brown's second book attempts to chronicle the rise and fall of Malcolm X as well as that of rival leader Martin Luther King against the backdrop of the civil rights and black nationalist movements.

[citation needed] In 2006, his profile-interview of translator Gregory Rabassa was published in 2006 by the University of Delaware's Review of Latin American Studies.

His father, John Brown, was a writer and running back with the late 1950s Iowa Hawkeyes football team who played in the 1959 Rose Bowl.