Brenda Brown Canary

Brenda Brown Canary (1945–2020) was an American novelist, best known for her 1982 horror novel The Voice of the Clown.

Life Néé Brenda Brown, she was the only child of Harold Brown and Kathryn Kerr Kunc, of Edmond, Oklahoma.

She received a speech and drama degree in 1970 and a master's in creative writing in 1973 from Central State University, with a minor in journalism. She went on to work for the state Department of Human Services for eight years as an investigator and taught at Rose State College before quitting her work to pursue full-time writing in 1977. After divorcing in 1981, however, she returned to Central State as an instructor for the creative writing department.

She died in Guthrie, Oklahoma in 2020. She had one stepson, one son and one daughter.

Works and legacy Despite pursuing a career as a full-time writing at a time, The first one, Home to the Mountain, a romantic mystery she wrote as her master's thesis, was published in hardcover by Walkee & Co. Later that year, it appeared as "Novel of the Month" in Cosmopolitan magazine and was optioned twice for a film adaptation. By December the same year, the novel was being reprinted after selling out its initial run of 99,500 copies,