Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
One of the first American Gothic novels, Edgar Huntly (1787) mirrors the social and political temperaments of the postrevolutionary United States.
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Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was born to a merchant Quaker family in Philadelphia, and was educated at Robert Proud’s school. In his early twenties he committed himself to literature and avidly read the latest models from England and Europe—especially Rousseau, Bage, Godwin, Southey, and Coleridge. By 1795 Brown was earnestly devoted to fiction; once engaged, he composed at a breakneck pace, publishing between 1797 and 1802 seven romances, a long pro-feminist dialogue, and numerous sketches and tales. Four of those romances earned him the perhaps dubious title of "father of the American novel"—Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part 1, 1799; Part II, 1800), and between those two parts, Edgar Huntly (1799). All four are remarkably sophisticated moral, psychological, and political allegories that burned into the artistic consciousness…
Wieland
Charles Brockden Brown Introduction and Notes by Caleb Crain
Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
Charles Brockden Brown; Introduction by Jay Fliegelman