Several great books about John Brown, including Russell Banks’s “Cloudsplitter” and a bio from W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois wanted to bio Frederick Douglass, with whom Brown frequently argued over anti-slavery tactics. Booker T. Washington got the Douglass book in the end.
Social justice types at the University of Kansas in Lawrence have always kept up his memory in various ways. Despite Kansas being a very conservative place, the statehouse has a radical mural of him inside of it holding a Bible and a rifle and furiously thundering against slavery.