User:BrownPearl

BrownPearl was born in Hollywood, California in 1927. My father was a young screenwriter and director. My mother was a twice married woman, mother of seven, and former school teacher who fell in love with him.

I received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver in 1971. I taught writing and literature for over thirty years, including ten years of advanced composition, online, after my formal retirement as a full professor in the Department of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver Previously MSCD, MSC There, I developed and taught an online, upper-level course on writing literary non-fiction. I wrote and researched a (juvenile) biography Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad for Silver-Burdette. I am now writing a family history, parts of which I hope to publish.

I have done comprehensive research on Rowland Brown, his work, his critics, his reputation and his influence. I did not want to do this current project, but was forced to when someone put up a stub on Wikipedia that contained more mistakes than facts, all of which came from "reliable" sources and "verifiable" facts. Someone at Wikipedia has difficulty in recognizing the difference between research on human individuals and research currently established scientific doctrine, based on available facts, (one more of which can tumble a paradigm). Thinking human beings know that they do not ever know more than what they themselves are capable of knowing about the people they have spent their entire lives with, and that knowing the dates of there arrivals and departures and listing the alleged accomplishments has very little to do with the substance of ther lives. The ambiguities, the mysteries, the conflicting views, taken together, make up a glimpse, a faint shadow . . .no more than that.

The first "facts" i learned about a human being after entering school: Our first president chopped down a cherry tree and said "I cannot tell a lie. Then I learned that Betsy Ross made our first flag with her own hands. The last thing I learned as a fact in High School was that atoms could not be split, and if they could be the chain reaction that would destroy the entire earth. (That may yet turn out to have been true.) I graduated in 1945, about three months before I heard the announcement on the radio that we dropped and atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Now I would love to be able to finish my article, all neatly documented, before I die and there are no more people who care a bit about "the truth" of his life.