John Brown

John Brown 1810-82, Scottish essayist. He was a physician. His writing was collected in Horae Subsecivae (3 vol., 1858-82), which included his unique picture of a dog, Rab and His Friends (1859), and a memoir of that gifted child known to Walter Scott's circle as "Pet Marjorie," Marjorie Fleming (1863).

Bibliography: See his letters (ed. by his son and D. W. Forrest, 1907).

John Brown's Body, verse narrative of the Civil War by Stephen V. Benét, published in 1928 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

A prelude, “The Slaver,” sketches the background of intersectional antagonism with its account of an early slave ship, its harsh, pious master, Captain Ball, and the experiences of a conscience‐stricken mate. Then, with vivid impressionistic characterizations and rapid changes of scene, the poem tells of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and his execution; of the opening of the war, with episodes concerning Lincoln, Davis, Lee, Jackson, Grant, and other figures; and of the personal lives, now interrupted, of the fictional protagonists: Jack Ellyat, New England law student who joins the Union army; Clay Wingate, aristocratic Georgian who enlists in the Black Horse Troop, and his beautiful fiancée, Sally Dupré; Luke Breckinridge, ignorant mountaineer, who is not sure who the Yankees are, except that “they ain't Injuns neither”; Spade, renegade black; Jack Diefer, burly Pennsylvania farmer; Melora, a mountain girl with whom Ellyat has an idyllic interlude before his incarceration in a Southern prison; and others. The course of events until 1865 are thus described and interpreted, with a final passage concerned with the war's termination of the Southern dream of a patriarchal aristocratic nation, and the inauguration instead of an America of equalitarianism and industrial mechanization.