Brown, a pragmatist above all, turned from poetry to prose. Simultaneous with a Guggenheim Fellowship, he served the Federal Writers' Project for three years as editor of Negro affairs and contributor to American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse (1937) and Washington City and Capital (1937), both published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. In 1939, he joined the staff of the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in American Life. In addition to issuing literary criticism, he collaborated with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee on a comprehensive Afro-centric anthology, The Negro Caravan (1941).
The poet's writings added to the wealth of post–Harlem Renaissance fervor in numerous anthologies and journals. Four prose masterworks — Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction, published in 1937 and reissued in 1969, and The Negro Newcomers in Detroit and The Negro in Washington, written with George E. Haynes in 1970 — display his scholarship and articulate analyses. In 1973, Folkway Records released Sixteen Poems by Sterling Brown, a disc recording. Late volumes of verse include The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems (1975) and The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (1980), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry prize.
Brown earned a reputation for refinement, pedagogical skill, an easy, unpretentious manner, and commitment to his race. In his scholarly essays, he defied the Fugitive Agrarian set at Vanderbilt and warned of a trend toward glorifying the slave-era South. To combat false memories that glossed over slavery, he urged black authors to discredit short-sightedness and to create literature from a stringently truth-seeking perspective. Shortly before his death in 1989, he was named Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia.
