Larry Brown, 53, Firefighter, Author

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Larry Brown, a firefighter turned author who wrote of the poor rural South and the consequences of life there in books such as “Big Bad Love” and “Joe,” died Wednesday at his home in the Tula community near Oxford. He was 53 and suffered a heart attack.


Brown briefly attended the University of Mississippi and learned the craft of writing mainly by avid reading.


Brown worked in a number of jobs over the years, including carpenter, lumberjack, fence builder, carpet cleaner, housepainter, hay hauler, and store employee, but he began writing during his career as a firefighter, a job he held from 1973 to 1990, when he retired to write full-time.


First publishing stories in a number of magazines and journals, Brown’s first book was a collection of stories published in 1988. The following year, he published his first novel, “Dirty Work,” which was inspired in part by his father’s experiences in World War II.


“Big Bad Love” (1990) depicted marital malaise of varying degrees, while the novel “Joe” (1991) teamed up the title character, a hard-drinking ex-convict who heads up a forest defoliation crew, with 15-year-old Gary Jones, the son of a truly evil no-count drunk migrant worker.


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