Joe Brown

Who was Joe Brown?

Joe David Brown was an American novelist and journalist from Birmingham, Alabama. He drew memorably from his own life to compose his fiction: his grandfather's role as a minister, his own knowledge of confidence games from his work as a reporter, his World War II experiences, and his residence on journalistic assignment in India. He is particularly remembered for the title character of his novel Addie Pray, the young "Mistress of the Con Game" during the Great Depression in the Deep South; the story later became the film Paper Moon.

Brown was born in Birmingham, the son of William Samuel Brown, a newspaper publisher, and Lucille Lokey Brown. At age 20, he became a police reporter for the Birmingham Post and in the same year married Mildred Harbour, with whom he had two sons, David and Ted. At age 21, Brown became city editor of the Dothan Eagle. From 1935 to 1939, he worked for newspapers in Atlanta, Georgia; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and St. Louis, Missouri. In 1939, he began working for the New York Daily News, but his time there was interrupted in 1942 by World War II, in which he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Brown was one of the first men to parachute into Normandy, France, for the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion, receiving a battlefield commission as second lieutenant and being awarded the Purple Heart and Croix de Guerre with Palm.