Harriet C. Brown

Harriet Connor Brown (September 11, 1872 – July 9, 1962) was an American women's rights activist and an author. She was the first woman to win the Woodford Prize from Cornell University. Brown wrote for multiple newspapers and the United States government. Her book Grandmother Brown's Hundred Years, 1827–1927 won the Atlantic Monthly Prize in 1929.

Personal life and early career Harriet Connor Brown was born as Harriet Chedie Connor on September 11, 1872, in Burlington, Iowa. She went to Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, over a winter before attending Cornell University. She was a part of the university's newspaper The Cornell Era in 1893. She was the first woman editor to be on the newspaper's staff and was the first woman that won the Woodford Prize in oration from Cornell University with a speech based on religious thought titled "The Letter and the Spirit". The Woodford Prize is the highest award that can be given to Cornell University students.

Later career Brown began journalism in 1896, working for the New-York Tribune, the New York Journal, and the Buffalo Enquirer. After marrying Herbert D. Brown in 1897, they worked together to write reports for government agencies such as the Civil Service, Congress, and William Howard Taft's Commission on Economy and Efficiency. From 1903 to 1907, Brown wrote the press bulletin for the United States Geological Survey. She was a part of missions in the Caribbean.

Publications Brown wrote Grandmother Brown's Hundred Years, 1827–1927 which is about the pioneer life of her mother-in-law Maria Dean Foster Brown in Fort Madison, Iowa. The book won the Atlantic Monthly Prize and $5,000 in 1929 "for the most interesting biography of any kind, sort, or description." Former Vice President Charles G. Dawes said, Here is a fine picture of the New England character as it reacted 200 years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers to a new environment. The book is more than that. It is an epic of American life in the early and later days of the middle west.