Cecil Morris Brown is a novelist, essayist, short-story writer, university lecturer, critic, and screenwriter who is possibly best known for The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. This satirical and outrageously comic yet deeply serious story of black survival in a corrupt society reflected the mood of both street-wise young blacks and sardonic college students of the 1960s. Confusing and boring to some reviewers, praised by others, the novel received widespread attention.

Brown was born in Bolton, North Carolina, to Cecil and Dorothy Brown--tobacco sharecroppers. By the time he was fifteen, Cecil was sharecropping his own five-acre plot, and at the age of eighteen he entered the Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. In the classroom, he and a friend named George Raleigh (the prototype, possibly, of George Washington, Brown's major fictional character) amused and delighted their classmates with irreverent, comic, and often incisive comments about...