Academy Award Winner, Writer Harry Brown Dies at Age 69

Harry Brown, an Academy Award-winning scenarist equally well-known for his wartime novel “A Walk in the Sun,” died Monday at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.

He was 69 and had suffered from emphysema.

Born in Maine and educated at Harvard, Brown worked for Time and New Yorker magazines before World War II.

He joined the Army and was assigned to the staff of Yank, a servicemen’s magazine, in London, where he began writing war stories.

One was “A Walk in the Sun,” which traces an Army patrol after the Salerno landings in 1943.

It became a best seller and was made into a film in 1946 starring Dana Andrews, Richard Conte and Sterling Holloway.

The success of the novel sent Brown to Hollywood, where he wrote such pictures as “Arch of Triumph,” “Wake of the Red Witch,” “Only the Valiant,” “D-Day the Sixth of June,” “Ocean’s 11” and finally “El Dorado.”

Brown won his Oscar for “A Place in the Sun,” which he and Michael Wilson adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s novel, “An American Tragedy.”

He retired and moved to Mexico, but returned to the United States several years ago.

Survivors include his wife, June, and a son and a daughter.