Charles Brockden Brown Three Gothic Novels [Hardcover]

O! What splendid fortune that the Library of America should be so generous as to rescue from the mists of oblivion such an author as Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). This son of Pennslyvania Quakers was sent forth to obtain an education in preparation for an eventual career in the law, but then he came upon the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Richardson, whose novels inspired Brown to embark upon a literary career of his own. Years of poverty and ill health--for young Brown was a consumptive--followed, and then, within a four-year period, he would produce seven novels, three of which have been gathered in this volume.

Here you will encounter a young man, newly arrived in the city of Philadelphia, caught in the grip of the yellow fever, whose employer is revealed as an adulterous, murderous fiend (Arthur Mervyn). You will be introduced to the protagonist of Edgar Huntly, whose efforts to unmask the killer of his best friend launch him into a somnabulent landscape drenched with the blood of cougars and Indians. And, in Wieland, you will confront, along with Clara, the dreadful threat posed by the master of ventriloquism! You may scoff at such terrors, O jaded reader, steeped in the demonic gore and Freudian underpinnings of contemporary horror and suspense, but know this--the outpourings of the fevered imagination of Charles Brockden Brown--who lived and wrote well before Poe, before Lovecraft--are a vital source of the power the Gothic continues to have over the American reader today. V.C. Andrews, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Patterson ... these and so many more (even, some whisper, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison) live under the gloomy shadow of Brown's melodramas. How long, reader, before you, too, have succumbed to their 18th-century charms?

This latest Library of America volume combines Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799), and Edgar Huntly (1799). All three portray murder, madness, religious obsession, the dangers of the wild, and jolly things like that. This also contains notes on the texts and a chronology of the author's life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Library's painstaking recovery of significant and neglected classic American writers continues with this handsome edition of the three best-known works of our first novelist of sustained achievement. Into a brief lifetime (1771 - 1810) also dedicated to ``epic'' poetry and tireless political commentary, Brown crowded several ambitious melodramas that absorbed various European romantic influences, and foreshadowed the more accomplished ``Gothic'' fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and, eventually, Faulkner. Wieland (1798), his only widely read novel, spins from the actual story of a deranged farmer who murdered his family a gripping tale of madness complicated by the notorious ``science'' of ventriloquism. Its successors - Arthur Mervyn (1799), which vigorously dramatizes an epidemic of ``yellow fever'' in Brown's native Philadelphia, and Edgar Huntly (1799), a collection of nonstop action scenes unified by the intriguing theme of sleepwalking - are in many ways its equals. An important and long-overdue homage to one of the milestone figures of our early literary history. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Before Poe and Melville and Hawthorne there was Brockden Brown. -- Patrick McGrath

Prefiguring the work of Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner, as well as the entire tradition of American noir and horror, Brockden Brown was America's first professional novelist. This volume collects his most significant works: "Wieland; or The Transformation" (1798), about a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist; "Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793" (1799), with its devastating depiction of a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia; and "Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker" (1799), which recasts traditional Gothic themes in the American wilderness.

The Library of America is an award-winning, nonprofit program dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as "the most important book-publishing project in the nation's history" (Newsweek), this acclaimed series is restoring America's literary heritage in "the finest-looking, longest-lasting edition ever made" (New Republic).