Larry Brown, 53; Writer Used Lean Prose to Tell His Tales in the Southern Gothic Tradition

Larry Brown, a critically praised writer of Southern fiction who used plain language to tell complex stories about ordinary people in crisis, died Wednesday of an apparent heart attack at his home in Oxford, Miss., according to his publisher, Algonquin Press. He was 53.

Brown had not been in ill health, but friends said that his family had a history of heart trouble.

In his novels and short stories, Brown wrote lean prose about people who lived with marital strife, suicide and the scars of war. Their coping mechanisms ranged from resignation to alcohol to tired faith.

Brown’s “own brand of Southern Gothic,” wrote novelist Ron Hansen in the magazine “America,” is “full of whiskey and cigarettes, furious passions and hidden pasts, about white trash tenacious as weeds who will not let go of anything.”

“His characters were always very passionate people,” Hansen told The Times on Wednesday. “The quest for good as opposed to evil was always in his fiction. And even though his people often acted in dreadful ways, his writing was full of droll humor.”

Brown did not set out in life to be a writer. A native of Oxford, his father was a farmer and his mother was the town’s postmaster. He graduated from high school, but according to his longtime editor, Shannon Revenel, Brown had to repeat senior English to get his diploma.

“He just didn’t understand how English could help him earn a living,” Revenel said Wednesday.

After high school, Brown married and held a number of odd jobs, including laborer, hay hauler, fence builder, painter and fork-lift operator. He was in the Marines during the Vietnam War, but was stationed in the States. When he was discharged, Brown decided that dead-end jobs were not what he wanted for himself or his children.

He joined the Oxford Fire Department, and at the age of 29 decided he wanted to be a writer. Always a voracious reader -- he was a big fan of Western novels and Stephen King -- Brown taught himself to write by studying the works of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. He also read books on the craft and took a few classes at the University of Mississippi at Oxford.

He borrowed his wife’s typewriter and spent seven months writing a novel about a killer bear in Yellowstone National Park. It was rejected by every publisher, and Brown would later call it “terrible and unreadable.” In 1982, he had a small break when the motorcycle magazine “Easy Rider” published one of his short stories. Revenel said she first came upon Brown’s writing in the mid-1980s, when she read a story of his called “Facing the Music” in the literary journal Mississippi Review. Revenel contacted Brown, who by that time had written about 100 short stories. In 1988, Algonquin Press, a small literary house in North Carolina, published 10 of his stories under the title “Facing the Music.”

“ ‘Facing the Music’ was an appropriate title for this collection and pretty much for his work as a whole,” Revenel said, “because that’s what his characters did. They faced the music of life.”

A year later, his first novel, “Dirty Work,” a tale of two badly wounded GIs from the Vietnam War, was published to positive reviews.

“There has been no antiwar novel -- certainly no first novel -- quite like ... ‘Dirty Work’ since Dalton Trumbo’s ‘Johnny Got His Gun,’ which was published more than 50 years ago,” Herbert Mitgang wrote in the New York Times.

Novelist Rick Bass observed that with “Dirty Work,” Brown “accomplished that rarest of feats: following a strong first work with an even stronger second one.”

Another collection of stories, “Big Bad Love,” came next and garnered good reviews. It also allowed him to quit his job as a firefighter. The title story was made into a 2001 film starring Debra Winger and Arliss Howard.

Brown’s other novels included “Joe,” “Father and Son” and “The Rabbit Factory.”

His nonfiction work consisted of two collections of essays: “On Fire,” about his years with the Oxford Fire Department; and “Billy Ray’s Farm,” a collection of essays about his life as a writer.

Brown was the recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Southern Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Thomas Wolfe Award.

A documentary on his life and work, “The Rough South of Larry Brown,” came out in 2000.

Survivors include his wife, Mary Annie; three adult children, Billy Ray, Shane and Lee Anne; and two granddaughters.