"Brownie," as his artist friends called him, epitomizes the rule of "90% of life is just showing up." A Canadian school drop out, he worked on a steamer, sketching in his spare time (he sold these to newspapers). Saving his earnings, he enrolled at the Art Student’s League and studied under Walter Appleton Clark, F W DuMond, and FR Gruger. When a friend got a job from the Saturday Evening Post to cover a circus, Brownie went along. The Post liked the article AND Brown's circus drawings. They bought them, a relationship between publisher and artist that lasted 40-years. Brown's pencils appeared in most Post issues from the teens on. He concentrated on story art (no covers) for Collier's, College Humor, Redbook, Cosmopolitan. He also contributed posters for the WWI effort and book art for books (The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams, The Fortune Hunter, The Upper Crust, Messer Marco Polo, The Midlanders, The Lady Evelyn). The vast majority of Brown's work was in pencil, though ink and color wash began appearing in his kit from the early 30s.