His books, published under the name Slater Brown, include the novel The Burning Wheel (1943); Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys (1956), a biography for children; and The Heyday of Spiritualism (1970), a study of the 19th-century interest in parapsychology and the occult.

His great-great grandfather, businessman Samuel Slater, was the chief founder of Webster and is credited with beginning the industrial revolution in the United States with the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1790.

[1] Early family wealth disappeared through a series of misfortunes, and Brown and his younger siblings, Fritz, Joyce and Kitty, grew up in relative poverty.

From the age of 16, while living with cousins in Boston, the rebellious Brown adopted a life and world philosophy at odds to that of his parents, and he undertook a process of self-discovery that led him to a failed enrollment at Columbia School of Journalism.

Brown later became part of the bohemian circle of artists and writers in Greenwich Village, New York, contributing articles and reviews to magazines and journals such as The New Masses and The Dial.