Sleeping on an Office Floor, Dreaming of the Stage

Les Brown was born Leslie Calvin Brown on February 17, 1945, with a twin brother, Wesley, in Liberty City, a low-income part of Miami, Florida. Their birth mother gave them up a few weeks after they were born, and at six weeks old they were adopted by Mamie Brown, an unmarried cafeteria cook and domestic worker. Brown later said that everything he is and everything he has, he owes to his mother.

In fifth grade he was labelled as having a learning disability, and he said that since people said he was slow, he held to that pace. A speech and drama teacher at Booker T. Washington High School, LeRoy Washington, told him that another person's opinion of him does not have to become his reality, and that helped him reject the label.

After school he worked for Miami sanitation, then moved into radio, starting as a gofer and filling in on air when a disc jockey could not work. He became a disc jockey in the mid-1960s, later hosted a top-rated programme in Columbus, Ohio, and served three terms in the Ohio House of Representatives from 1976 to 1981.

Encouraged by a chance meeting with the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, he became a professional speaker himself. In 1986 he moved to Detroit with his clothes and one tape of his speeches. He rented an office shared with an attorney, and because he could not afford an apartment, he slept on its floor. He said he wanted it to be hard and cold so it would keep him striving.

He founded Les Brown Unlimited and, by the early 1990s, was among the highest-paid speakers in the country. In 1989 he became the first African American to win the National Speakers Association's Council of Peers Award of Excellence. His books Live Your Dreams (1992) and It's Not Over Until You Win! (1996) together sold more than half a million copies, and he won a regional Emmy in 1991 for his television programme.