Brown, Norman Oliver

Brown, Norman Oliver, 1913–2002, American scholar, philosopher, and social critic, b. El Oro, Mexico; grad. Oxford (1936), Univ. of Wisconsin (Ph.D.). A classicist much influenced by Freud, Brown thought that the degree to which sexuality was repressed in America led not only to the stifling of instincts but also to a perversion of human drives from life and art to money and death. In his writings he mingled such elements as Freudian psychology and Marxism, religious documents and literary works in order to arrive at new insights. His works include Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), Love's Body (1966), Hermes the Thief (1969), Closing Time (1973), and Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (1991).