Our Brother the Sun.
Publisher: Hermitage House
Published: 1954
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
First sentence: In the year of eighteen hundred and sixty-seven a revolution swept over San Judas of the Mines leaving death and destruction in its wake.
Description: Jacket copy: 

In a South American country, a sister-republic of Peru, there appeared about 1867 a blue-eyed, yellow-bearded giant of a man whom the Indians called "El Oro - the Golden One."  He was a Yankee named Cleon Brown with a mysterious past.  In the Civil War he had betrayed a Northern whaling fleet to the Confederates, and Captain "Jawbone" Hitch has come to South America to settle that score with Cleon Brown.  This novel is about the strange character of Brown, "the Golden One," a man of violence who struggles with himself to become a man of peace.

On Christmas Eve in the capital city of San Judas of the Mines the oppressed Indians, with Brown at their head, stage an uprising.  The dictator of the country, General Montenegro, a cold, crafty, hairless monster, makes only a token resistance.  He intends to wipe out the rich bourgeois party, "the Men of Good Will," and crush the Indians later.

What happens after the Christmas Eve revolution is surprising because of the cross-pulls on Cleon Brown's strange character.  He has fallen in love with Soledad, an Indian girl revolutionist, and she urges him to complete the uprising.  He is under constant provocation to violence.  But he has a New Egland conscience that has been nourished by Emerson.  This conscience mystifies both his followers and his opponent, the dictator Montenegro.

Montenegro schemes to overthrow Brown without making a martyr - and a legend - of him.  But Brown is goaded to violence - and a legend is born.

This is a beautifully written, picturesque novel with a prfound theme and an amazing array of exotic characters.  Among the characters are a coxcomb of a bullfighter, Maldito; a wise one-hundred-year-old Indian chief, Hervidero; a frivolous senorita, Candelaria Echeverria, whose indiscreet tongue imperils her father; an Indian disciple, "El Profesor," of the anarchist Bakunin; and a Greek flute-player, a Yankee dentist, an old hag soothsayer, and numerous other colorful figures.

Towering over them is the Viking-like figure of Cleon Brown, as enigmatic a character as Melville's Billy Budd or Conrad's Mr. Kurtz.

Back cover copy: 
Basil Burwell is head of the Drama Department at the Cherry Lawn School at Darien, Conn., and director of the Silvermine Guild Players at Silvermine, Conn.  He has acted in New York, Boston, Hollywood, and London, and directed plays for various summer stock companies.  He has published a book of verse, Slave Cargo.

The seeds of Our Brother the Sun, Burwell says, were sown in his imagination when he listened as a boy to tales of his grandfather, Master of the clipper ship Enoch Train, and of seafaring uncles, one of whom fought in the Civil War.  The seeds were nurtured by reading Prescott on Peru and by the sea tales of Cooper, Dana and Melville.  Seeing South America at first hand matured the imaginative process that resulted in Our Brother the Sun.