Charles Brockden Brown's novels are most often remembered as gothic fiction -- but he wasn't at all writing the sort of thing Ann Radcliffe was in his years writing on the other side of the Atlantic. His books were often violent, and full of the pointy-headed intellectuality of his day: they were drawn from late-Enlightenment scientific and medical thinking. Perhaps they're in debt to Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Holcroft -- and perhaps to the German "Schauer-romantik" of Friedrich Schiller. He built plots around motifs like sleepwalking and religious mania.

Author Biography

Charles Brockden Brown (1771 - 1810) was an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period. He is generally regarded by scholars as the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was not the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.