About Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 – March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. He is known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form—stories of one to three pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena", was adapted into a 1967 episode of the American television series Star Trek. == Early life and education == Fredric William Brown, the only child of Karl Lewis and Emma Amelia Brown (née Graham), was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 29, 1906 (and often wished he had been born two days later, on Halloween); he found a sad, piquant pleasure in recalling that 1906 was the year of the San Francisco Earthquake and the Atlanta Race Riot. His father Karl Brown was born in 1871 in Oxford, Ohio, son of Waldo Franklin Brown (1832–1907), a nationally familiar progressive agricultural writer and lecturer who edited the farm pages of The Cincinnati Enquirer and published articles under the name Johnny Plowboy. Karl was something of a get-rich-quick schemer, taking jobs in sales and secretarial correspondence, as well as serving as what one biographer calls "accountant—in the shady business enterprises of a substitute father figure, William P. Harrison, a pioneering if not overly scrupulous entrepreneur of direct mail marketing... headquartered in Columbus and later, after Columbus had gotten too hot for him, Cincinnati." When Fred was little, Karl Brown was arrested for fraud and Harrison bailed him out. A few years later, Harrison was put on trial for further frauds which gained nationwide headlines and was imprisoned. Biographer Curtis Evans suggests that these childhood experiences led to the shady and downright corrupt figures who appear in Fredric's mystery novels.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.