Joe David Brown did not seek out experiences.

He took his life as it was, in the heart of the American South in Birmingham, Alabama, the grandson of a preacher, the son of a newspaper publisher, a child of the Great Depression, a police reporter for the Birmingham newspaper, a World War II paratrooper awarded the Purple Heart and the French Croix de Guerre with Palm. 

Brown does not write as well as Ernest Hemingway, of course not, no one did, but Brown's stories are more legitimate, more organic, springing from the soil he found himself planted in. No exotic flower hot-housed in a foreign land was he, Brown found his stories as they came to him. This was the life he lived in Jim Crow Alabama. Brown could not tell his stories in print as well as Charles Dickens or Hemingway but the story is the thing, and if not communicated with full artistry by him, the story is still there, available to others more talented to tell, as Addie Pray was by Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovic in Paper Moon. Brown only wrote five novels, but three of them were turned into major motion pictures. The stories are Brown's legacy.