Curtis Franklin Brown

Curtis Franklin Brown was born on July 15, 1925, in Cambridge, MA, the son of Thomas Franklin Brown and Mildred Spoffard Curtis with his sisters, Priscilla and Lucille. He was raised in West Somerville, near Boston. After attending local public schools, he entered the U.S. Navy in 1943, and as a Laboratory Technician he served aboard ship on the Pacific Ocean until 1946. He attended Tufts University, Medford, MA, until graduating in 1949. He entered Columbia University Graduate School, where he earned a Master’s Degree in American Literature. He taught at Tufts until 1952, when he was invited by Columbia Records Co. to become a LP Album notes annotator. After publishing biographies of Jean Harlow and Ingrid Bergman, he wrote and published an extensive work on bad taste in many aspects of American Culture, “Star Spangled Kitsch”.

Mr. Brown moved to the Boerum Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY where he resided with his long time friend, Professor Hayden Goldberg, originally of Gardiner, Maine.

He will be put to rest in the Forest Dale Cemetery in Malden, MA.