![]() ![]() ![]() He used genre conventions, but also fashioned significant and unique innovations, repopulating the gloomy Gothic themes with the elements of the relatively young history of America. He undertook an ambitious literary self-education and wrote (or started) various novels and fictional political dialogues, most famously the feminist pamphlet, “Alcuin.” Brown is best known for four gothic novels- Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Merwyn, and Edgar Huntly-written in 18 months and published from 1798 to 1800.īrown is widely regarded as the father of American Gothic fiction, a form that emerged in Europe during the latter half of the 1700s as a dark, generally melodramatic development of late medieval Romance literature. Born in Philadelphia in 1771, four years before the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and in the midst of the events that led to the outbreak of the American Revolution, Brown’s politics and worldview directly stemmed from the tumultuous times.Įarly in his life (he died at the ripe young age of 39), Brown forsook his parentally determined calling as a lawyer in favor of transforming himself into a man of letters. Although not the very first, Charles Brockden Brown is likely the most cherished and highly regarded penman of the first generation of Early American writers. ![]()
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