Harry Brown (writer)

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Harry Peter McNab Brown, Jr. (April 30, 1917 – November 2, 1986) was a novelist and screenwriter.

Born in Portland, Maine, he was educated at Harvard University, where he was friends with American poet, Robert Lowell. Brown dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to write poetry, work at Time magazine, and contributed to and became a sub editor of The New Yorker.

In July 1941 Brown enlisted in the US Army Corps of Engineers and in 1942 joined the staff of Yank magazine. Brown wrote a column for the magazine under the nom de plume of "PFC Artie Greengroin" with a book published in 1945 of the columns under that title. Brown also wrote a play A Sound of Hunting that was produced on Broadway in 1946 starring Burt Lancaster and Frank Lovejoy. It was later filmed by Stanley Kramer under the title Eight Iron Men with a different cast of Bonar Colleano, Lee Marvin, and Arthur Franz in 1952, then was directed by Seymour Robbie in a 1961 television production with Peter Falk, Robert Lansing, and Sal Mineo.

Brown wrote the novel A Walk in the Sun in 1944, which was made into a film in 1945. Director Lewis Milestone asked Brown to come to Hollywood as a screenwriter were he worked on films including Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), A Place in the Sun (1951) (winning an Oscar), and Ocean's Eleven (1960). Brown also was credited for his work on the first Ocean's Eleven when it was remade in 2001.