An elderly mystic dies of spontaneous combustion in a secret temple. A young man is haunted by voices instructing him to slaughter his wife and children. A morose immigrant is suspected of a brutal murder. A sleepwalker undergoes a series of violent adventures in the wilderness. An innocent youth is caught up in the machinations of a vicious professional criminal. A fatal epidemic sweeps through an American city.

These haunted, dreamlike scenes define the fictional world of Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first professional novelist. Published in the final years of the eighteenth century, Brown’s startlingly prophetic novels 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 works that open onto dark recesses and turbulent conflict in the young American nation.

In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown’s works. Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, is often 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 experience 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 heirs include 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.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.