Charles Brockden Brown
Three Gothic Novels

Wieland • Arthur Mervyn • Edgar Huntly

"An important and long-overdue homage to one of the milestone figures of our early literary history." —Kirkus Reviews

This Library of America volume contains the most significant work of America's first professional novelist. Charles Brockden Brown's startlingly prophetic novels, first published in the final years of the eighteenth century, are a virtual résumé of themes that would constantly recur in American literature: madness and murder, suicide and religious obsession, the seduction of innocence and the dangers of wilderness and settlement alike.

Written in a nervous and effusive style in which rational discourse and hysterical rant contend for control, often narrated by characters on the brink of emotional breakdown, these are the works that open onto dark recesses and turbulent conflict in the recently founded American nation.

Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) is a novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, and considered his masterpiece. A relentlessly dark exploration of guilt, deception, and compulsion, it creates a sustained mood of irrational terror in the midst of the Pennsylvania countryside.

In Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Brown draws on his own experiences to create indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, while telling the story of a young man caught in the snares of a professional swindler.

Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American Wilderness in a series of eerily unreal adventures that test the limits of the protagonist's self-knowledge.

All three novels reveal Brown as the pioneer of a major vein of American writing, a novelist whose literary progeny encompasses Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and the whole tradition of horror and noir from Cornell Woolrich to Stephen King.

This volume also includes a newly researched chronology of Brown's life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.

Sydney J. Krause, volume editor, is professor emeritus of English at Kent State University, and general editor of the Kent State University Bicentennial Edition of the multi-volume Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown.

Also Available:
American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s
William Faulkner: Novels 1926–1929
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels
H.P. Lovecraft: Tales
Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales

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