Expatriate Writer William Brown Dies

William Slater Brown, one of the last of a generation of writers shaped by World War I and the experience of living as an expatriate in Europe, died June 22 of lung failure. He was 100.

Brown was friends with novelist John Dos Passos, poet Hart Crane and critic Malcolm Cowley and wrote 10 books of his own.

While he was serving in an American Red Cross ambulance corps in France during World War I, Brown was imprisoned with poet e.e. cummings for writing about the existence of French defectors. Cummings’ account of their imprisonment, “The Enormous Room,” referred to Brown as “B.”

Brown returned to the United States in 1918.

His books include “The Burning Wheel,” a novel; “Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys,” a children’s biography and “The Heyday of Spiritualism,” a study of the 19th-century interest in parapsychology and the occult.