Authors: Charles Brockden Brown

Despite his literary bent, Brown’s family insisted that he study law. He did so from 1787 until around 1793, when he announced that he would henceforth be a professional writer. After several visits to New York, Brown took up residence in that city, where he found, especially in the Friendly Society, the stimulation he needed as a writer. Brown was an ardent admirer of the British radical William Godwin, who was also a novelist, and Brown’s writing reflects that enthusiasm, as in Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798), which is really a treatise on the rights of women, though it uses elements of fiction to carry the message.

Following Alcuin, Brown turned to writing novels, through which he hoped to teach as well as entertain. Writing at a furious rate, he wrote and published six novels within four years. Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), which many regard as his best work, is based on an actual murder case in Pennsylvania. The book is a study in religious psychosis, with the added novelty of ventriloquism. The story is melodramatic and uses many of the devices of the English gothic fiction of the time, but it is original in that it uses American materials and presents a serious study of a human mind under pressures it does not understand.

In a later novel, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1798), Brown again made use of native materials. In 1793, he and his family, along with hundreds of others, had fled Philadelphia to escape an epidemic of yellow fever; five years later, another epidemic of the same disease in New York killed his close friend Elihu Hubbard Smith. Arthur Mervyn is a highly realistic account of the horrors of such a scourge, describing the effects of the Philadelphia epidemic in a manner comparable to Daniel Defoe’s description of the London plague of 1665 in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In other novels, Brown also made use of American subject matter. He introduced American Indians and the frontier into the American novel in Edgar Huntley; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799); unfortunately, Brown knew little about American Indians or the frontier and was unable to present them very realistically. The outstanding characteristic of the novel, as in Wieland, is the presentation of a human mind in torment.

There is no doubt that Brown’s novels were influenced by European fiction. Scholars generally consider the first American novel to be William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), which appeared less than a decade before Wieland. Brown’s significance stems from the fact that he was willing to use native materials and themes in his work. Too often critics have overemphasized the similarities between Brown’s work and that of Godwin without giving credit to Brown for his originality.

Despite his output of fiction between 1798 and 1801, Brown made too little money to support himself as a professional author. To supplement his income, he edited the Monthly Magazine and North American Review from 1799 to 1800. When the magazine failed, he returned to Philadelphia in 1801 and became a partner in his brothers’ mercantile firm. In 1804, he married Elizabeth Linn, and they had four children. Following the failure of the family firm in 1806, Brown became an independent merchant. During the last three years of his life, he continued to write, mostly nonfiction work for various periodicals.