Liberator? Madman? Genius? Martyr?  John Brown achieved immediate and
lasting notoriety through his attempt to foment an armed insurrection among
black slaves in 1859, an event that many believed hastened the outbreak of
the U.S. Civil War. From the moment of his capture at Harper's Ferry,
Virginia, there have been widely varying interpretations of the man and his
motivations. Sometimes depicted as the grim conscience of a nation whose
founding proclaimed the equality of all people, sometimes portrayed as a
terrorist more devoted to his own martyrdom than to his cause, Brown has
been a source of inspiration, fascination, and frustration for some of the
country's greatest writers and artists.

In this absorbing book, Bruce Ronda examines the representations of Brown
chronologically, ranging from Thoreau's “Plea for Captain John Brown”-with
its ardent defense of Brown as a patriot, Transcendentalist, and true New
Englander-through treatments by anonymous southern writers and well-known
authors such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Richard Henry
Dana, Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, and Edwin Arlington
Robinson. Ronda then considers the major treatments of Brown in the early to
mid-twentieth century by W. E. B. DuBois, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert
Penn Warren. Of particular interest are discussions of a 1930s poem by
Muriel Rukeyser, Truman Nelson's 1960 novel The Surveyor, and artwork by
Jacob Lawrence. He concludes with studies of novels by three contemporary
authors: Russell Banks, Michelle Cliff, and Bruce Olds.

Reading the Old Man challenges the assumption that literature about Brown
falls predictably into two camps-celebration or outrage-either defending
Brown as liberator and martyr or vilifying him as a traitor, incendiary, and
madman.  Instead, Ronda discovers a variety of approaches and reveals
subtler, more complex portraits, even comparing Brown's fervor to that of
today's religious terrorists.

Bruce Ronda is professor and chair of the Department of English at Colorado
State University. He is the author of Intellect and Spirit: The Life and
Works of Robert Coles and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own
Terms. He is the editor of The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American
Renaissance Woman.