William Hill Brown

Who Was William Hill Brown?

William Hill Brown wrote the first American novel. Born in Boston in 1765, he lived only twenty-eight years, dying in 1793 of what was then called bilious fever, but in that brief life he produced The Power of Sympathy (1789) — the first novel written and published in the United States — as well as plays, poetry, and essays. He was part of the Boston literary circle that included the painter John Singleton Copley and was educated in the culture of the new republic’s educated class.

The Power of Sympathy is an epistolary novel — told through an exchange of letters — that deals with seduction, incest, and suicide in the sentimental mode of the period. Its moral purpose is explicit: to warn young women against the dangers of seduction and to argue for the importance of female education as a defense against male predation. The novel is more significant as a historical artifact than as a literary achievement, but it established the terms for the early American novel’s characteristic concerns: virtue under threat, the dangers of passion, and the importance of moral formation.

Brown is significant for TLA as the inaugural figure of the American fictional tradition — a writer whose novel embodies the moral seriousness and the theological assumptions of the early republic’s literary culture.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Power of Sympathy — 1789 — first American novel
• West Point Preserved — 1797 — play, posthumous
• Ira and Isabella — 1807 — novel, posthumous