It's a man named Bob Brown.
From the piece in The New York Times...
Brown, born Robert Carlton Brown in Chicago in 1886, liked to say he had written in every genre imaginable: advertising, journalism, fiction, poetry, ethnography, screenwriting, even cookbooks. He wrote at least 1,000 pulp stories, some of which became the basis for “What Happened to Mary?,” the first movie serial, released in 1912. He was on the editorial board of the radical magazine The Masses before founding a successful business magazine in Brazil. He contributed to leading avant-garde journals and wrote, sometimes in collaboration with his wife and mother, some 30 popular books about food and drink, including “Let There Be Beer!” (published after the repeal of Prohibition) and “The Complete Book of Cheese.”
Brown was “the Zelig of the 20th-century avant-garde,” according to Craig Saper, a professor of texts and technology at the University of Central Florida who is writing a biography of him. Brown went everywhere and knew everyone: Marcel Duchamp, Eugene O’Neill, H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, James T. Farrell, William Carlos Williams. His output was so varied and his life so far-flung — he boasted of having lived in 100 cities — that some library card catalogs list him as at least two different people.
But today, Brown is perhaps best remembered for THE READIES (Rice University, various formats and prices), a 1930 manifesto blending the fervor of the Futurists with the playfulness of Jules Verne. “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age,” Brown declared in the first line. “The movies have outmaneuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies.” Enough with the tyranny of paper and ink! “Writing has been bottled up in books since the start,” Brown wrote. “It is time to pull out the stopper” and begin “a bloody revolution of the word.”
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