Brown, Peter C.
Brown, Peter C.
PERSONAL:
Married. Education: Degree from Beloit College.
ADDRESSES:
Home—St. Paul, MN.
CAREER:
Writer; retired management consultant.
WRITINGS:
The Complete Guide to Money-Making Ventures for Nonprofit Organizations (nonfiction), Taft Group (Washington, DC), 1986.
Jumping the Job Track: Security, Satisfaction, and Success As an Independent Consultant (nonfiction), Crown (New York, NY), 1994.
The Fugitive Wife (novel), W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2006.
SIDELIGHTS:
Peter C. Brown's novel The Fugitive Wife was inspired by diaries written by his grandfather, who worked as a gold prospector and mining engineer during the Alaskan gold rush. The tersely worded journals merely served as a starting point for Brown's imaginative story of a woman named Essie, who flees an abusive marriage and her home in Minnesota and ends up in Alaska. Her companions along the way include a prospector, a mining company foreman, and a highly educated African American woman. Each of them hopes to make a fresh start at life in Alaska. Reviewing The Fugitive Wife for the New York Times Book Review, Gregory Cowles called it "an enormously satisfying first novel" that is as much concerned with the search for identity as it is with seeking the elusive fortune in gold. The novel has a "sense of mystery," commented Marta Segal Block in her Booklist review. Block approved of the way Essie's viewpoint authentically depicted the prevailing attitudes of the day. The novel's hard-edged characters frequently mask "affectingly yearning and haunted souls," found a Publishers Weekly writer, who further praised The Fugitive Wife as an "eloquent, memorable" debut novel. A Kirkus Reviews writer found the setting, plot, and prose style all excellent, but added that above all, the novel is "a tale of perennial obsessions—greed, sex, love and fevered need."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 15, 1994, Barbara Jacobs, review of Jumping the Job Track: Security, Satisfaction, and Success As an Independent Consultant, p. 882; January 1, 2006, Marta Segal Block, review of The Fugitive Wife, p. 52.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2005, review of The Fugitive Wife, p. 1243.
New York Times Book Review, February 26, 2006, review of The Fugitive Wife, p. 14.
Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2005, review of The Fugitive Wife, p. 30.