Charles Brockden Brown

Who Was Charles Brockden Brown?

Charles Brockden Brown was the first significant American novelist — a Philadelphia Quaker who, in the late 1790s, produced a remarkable series of Gothic novels that established the terms for American fiction’s engagement with the dark underside of Enlightenment rationalism. Born into a prosperous Quaker family and educated in law, he turned to fiction in his twenties and produced four major novels — Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), and Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) — in a period of extraordinary creative energy before illness, marriage, and editorial work largely ended his fiction writing.

Wieland, or The Transformation is his masterwork: a novel about a man who believes he hears the voice of God commanding him to murder his wife and children, and who obeys. The novel is a sustained examination of the relationship between religious enthusiasm, psychological instability, and violence — a relationship that the rational optimism of the Enlightenment was ill-equipped to understand.

Brown is significant for TLA because he was the first American novelist to take seriously the question of what happens when religious experience goes wrong — when the conviction of divine communication becomes the instrument of atrocity. His Gothic novels are, at their best, theological investigations conducted in the mode of terror.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Wieland, or The Transformation — 1798
• Ormond — 1799
• Edgar Huntly — 1799
• Arthur Mervyn — 1799–1800