Charles Brockden Brown

Three Gothic Novels

Wieland • Arthur Mervyn • Edgar Huntly

"In 1846, the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller called Brown one of 'the dark masters,' because it was Brown's genius to descend, precipitously, into the twisty maze of a lonely mind that was trying to think its way back to the light.
ýýýýýýý...Though he did not realize it, during his brief, doleful career Brown succeeded in infecting America with his perverse and incurable taste. The nation has been horrified ever since."

"Now Charles Brockden Brown gets his due from the inestimable Library of America, in the new volume, Three Gothic Novels. That's right, Gothic novels. Poe receives the credit, but it was this Philadelphia native (1771-1810) who in these bizarre works written with remarkable speed in 1798 and 1799...established the young country's post-Revolution landscape as a dark, horrific and inexplicable realm. Brown's first-person narrators often loiter at the brink of madness, so their dense, self-absorbed and hysterical prose seems perfect for these tales of sudden violence, mayhem and murder, devastating epidemics, religious obsession, human spontaneous combustion, somnambulism and mesmerism, the degradation of innocence and the triumph of criminality. Brown's exploration of and insights into the turbulent recesses of America's psyche and his highly charged, yet introspective, style created the tradition within which Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Faulkner worked."

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