Brooks Bowman (October 21, 1913 – October 17, 1937) composed the song "

East of the Sun (and West of the Moon) "East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)" is a popular song written by Brooks Bowman, an undergraduate member of Princeton University's Class of 1936, for the 1934 production of the Princeton Triangle Club's production of Stags at Bay. It was pub ...

" which has become a

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

standard.

Biography

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he graduated from

University School University School, commonly referred to as US, is an all-boys, private, Junior Kindergarten–12 school with two campus locations in the Greater Cleveland area of Ohio. The campus located in Shaker Heights serves junior kindergarten through eigh ...

in that city, but had completed his first three years of preparatory school at Asheville School in Asheville, North Carolina. He then attended Stanford University for one year before transferring to

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

as a sophomore, in the fall of 1933. While an

undergraduate student Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, in the United States, an entry- ...

at Princeton he wrote the songs for the Princeton Triangle Club musical 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 Selznick International Pictures was a Hollywood motion picture studio created by David O. Selznick in 1935, and dissolved in 1943. In its short existence the independent studio produced two films that received the Academy Award for Best Picture— ...

. 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 Garrison is a hamlet in Putnam County, New York, United States. It is part of the town of Philipstown, on the east side of the Hudson River, across from the United States Military Academy at West Point. The Garrison Metro-North Railroad st ...

. 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