On Being Brown by Scott Huler

On Being Brown by Scott Huler

What is this madness all about? Anyone who has experienced it knows: being a Cleveland Browns fan is just different.

Why are we the only fans in the nation who ever demanded their team back--and got it? Why did three seasons without football fail even to dampen the enthusiasm? Why have we endured years of heartache (The Fumble, The Drive, Red Right 88 . . .) yet grown ever more attached to the experience?

These 33 essays hold the answer. Scott Huler's nostalgic memoirs, and his interviews with Browns legends and other fans, uncover those essential, special elements of shared experience that define what being a Browns fan has meant for us all.

It's about pride. It's about desire, tempered by crushing disappointment. It's about tradition, and learning how to root for the home team at your father's side. It's about rivalry and electrifying victory. It's about longing--for a return to past championships, for future glory. It's about heart. It's about all that, and much more.

This odyssey takes Browns fans back to some wonderful places. It revives some truly heartbreaking moments. And it looks to the future with great hope. If you're Brown, you'll enjoy the ride.

The author of seven books of nonfiction including the just published A Delicious Country (2019), Scott Huler has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as Backpacker, Fortune, and ESPN. His award-winning radio work has been heard on All Things Considered and Day to Day on National Public Radio and on Marketplace and Splendid Table on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books have been translated into five languages. You can find his Muckrack page here.

He was a 2002-2003 Knight-Wallace Fellow at Michigan, 2011 Piedmont Laureate in creative nonfiction, and a 2014-2015 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Awards he has won include Public Radio News Directors Inc. Awards, Tennessee AP Broadcasters Association Awards, and most recently a 2020 CASE Circle of Excellence Award.

He currently works as the senior writer at Duke Magazine and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.