On January 6, 1990, after seventeen years on the job, award-winning novelist Larry Brown quit the Oxford, mississippi, fire department. With three published books to his credit and a fourth nearly finished, he made the r...On January 6, 1990, after seventeen years on the job, award-winning novelist Larry Brown quit the Oxford, mississippi, fire department. With three published books to his credit and a fourth nearly finished, he made the risky decision to try life as a full-time writer.