E. K. Brown
| E. K. Brown | |
|---|---|
| Born | Edward Killoran Brown August 15, 1905 Toronto, Ontario |
| Died | February 24, 1953 (aged 47) Chicago, Illinois |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Citizenship | British subject |
| Notable awards | Governor General's Award, Lorne Pierce Medal |
Edward Killoran Brown (August 15, 1905 – April 24, 1951), who wrote as E.K. Brown, was a Canadian professor and literary critic. He "influenced Canadian literature primarily through his award-winning book On Canadian Poetry (1943)," which "established the standards of excellence and many of the subsequent directions of Canadian criticism." Northrop Frye called him "the first critic to bring Canadian literature into its proper context".
E.K. Brown was born in Toronto, the son of Winifred Killoran and Edward David Brown, a businessman. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1926, winning the Governor-General's Medal for Modern Languages and a scholarship to the Sorbonne.
Brown taught at the University of Toronto from 1929 through 1941, except for two years chairing the University of Manitoba's English Department. He was an associate editor of the Canadian Forum from 1930 to 1933, and published over 50 articles in that journal.
Between 1932 and 1941 Brown was an editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly. In 1936 he began the column "Letters in Canada", an annual survey in the Quarterly of the year's crop of Canadian poetry. He left the University of Toronto in 1941 to take a position at Cornell University, but he continued to write "Letters in Canada" each year until 1950, at which time the column was taken over by Northrop Frye. Brown later used two of his "Letters in Canada" essays – "The Contemporary Situation in Canadian Literature" (1938) and "The Development of Canadian Poetry 1880-1940" (1941) – in his 1943 book, On Canadian Poetry.
In 1941 Brown edited a special all-Canadian issue of prestigious Chicago magazine Poetry.
From 1941 to 1944 Brown chaired Cornell University's English Department, except for six months on staff as a speechwriter to Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
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