Brooks Bowman (October 21, 1913 – October 17, 1937) composed the song " East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)" which has become a jazz standard.

Biography

A native of

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

, he graduated from University School in that city, but had completed his first three years of preparatory school at Asheville School in

Asheville, North Carolina Asheville ( ) is a city in, and the county seat of, Buncombe County, North Carolina. Located at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers, it is the largest city in Western North Carolina, and the state's 11th-most populous cit ...

. He then attended

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

for one year before transferring to Princeton University as a sophomore, in the fall of 1933. While an undergraduate student at Princeton he wrote the songs for the

Princeton Triangle Club The Princeton Triangle Club is a theater troupe at Princeton University. Founded in 1891, it is one of the oldest collegiate theater troupes in the United States. Triangle premieres an original student-written musical every year, and then takes ...

musical Musical is the adjective of music. Musical may also refer to: * Musical theatre, a performance art that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance * Musical film and television, a genre of film and television that incorporates into the narr ...

titled ''Stags at Bay'' in 1934, including "East of the Sun" (which almost didn't make it into the play due to a copyright dispute). Other songs he wrote for the show included "Love and a Dime" and "Will Love Find a Way?" For the Triangle Club production of 1936, he wrote ''What a Relief!'' which included the songs "Give Me a Gibson Girl," "Love Will Live On," "A Newspaper Picture of You," and "Then I Shan't Love You Anymore." He was also president of the Princeton Tower Club during his senior year. Following his graduation from Princeton with the class of 1936, Bowman moved to California where, in 1937, he briefly worked under contract as a songwriter for Selznick International Pictures. Released from his contract in September 1937, he returned to the East where he formed a songwriting partnership, in which he would have been the lyricist, with a former Princeton classmate.

Death

A New York music publisher offered the team a contract, but before it was signed Brooks Bowman died on October 17, 1937 when a car in which he was riding crashed into a stone wall on Cat Rock Road near Garrison, New York. Four days later, on October 21, he would have celebrated his 24th birthday. He is buried in the family plot at Grandview Cemetery in Salem, Ohio where his family moved while he was attending Princeton University.

Sources

Princeton University Archives
Link: www.tribute-to-brooks.de (in German)

References

American male composers American musical theatre lyricists Princeton University alumni 1913 births 1937 deaths Road incident deaths in New York (state) Musicians from Cleveland Songwriters from Ohio 20th-century American composers 20th-century American male musicians American male songwriters {{US-composer-20thC-stub