Product Description

Prefiguring the work of Poe, Hawthorne, and Faulkner, as well as the entire tradition of American noir and horror, Brockden Brown was America's first professional novelist. This volume collects his most significant works: "Wieland; or The Transformation" (1798), about a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist; "Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793" (1799), with its devastating depiction of a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia; and "Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker" (1799), which recasts traditional Gothic themes in the American wilderness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165400 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 925 pages

Amazon.com Review
O! What splendid fortune that the Library of America should be so generous as to rescue from the mists of oblivion such an author as Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). This son of Pennslyvania Quakers was sent forth to obtain an education in preparation for an eventual career in the law, but then he came upon the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Richardson, whose novels inspired Brown to embark upon a literary career of his own. Years of poverty and ill health--for young Brown was a consumptive--followed, and then, within a four-year period, he would produce seven novels, three of which have been gathered in this volume.

Here you will encounter a young man, newly arrived in the city of Philadelphia, caught in the grip of the yellow fever, whose employer is revealed as an adulterous, murderous fiend (Arthur Mervyn). You will be introduced to the protagonist of Edgar Huntly, whose efforts to unmask the killer of his best friend launch him into a somnabulent landscape drenched with the blood of cougars and Indians. And, in Wieland, you will confront, along with Clara, the dreadful threat posed by the master of ventriloquism! You may scoff at such terrors, O jaded reader, steeped in the demonic gore and Freudian underpinnings of contemporary horror and suspense, but know this--the outpourings of the fevered imagination of Charles Brockden Brown--who lived and wrote well before Poe, before Lovecraft--are a vital source of the power the Gothic continues to have over the American reader today. V.C. Andrews, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Patterson ... these and so many more (even, some whisper, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison) live under the gloomy shadow of Brown's melodramas. How long, reader, before you, too, have succumbed to their 18th-century charms?

From Library Journal
This latest Library of America volume combines Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799), and Edgar Huntly (1799). All three portray murder, madness, religious obsession, the dangers of the wild, and jolly things like that. This also contains notes on the texts and a chronology of the author's life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
The Library's painstaking recovery of significant and neglected classic American writers continues with this handsome edition of the three best-known works of our first novelist of sustained achievement. Into a brief lifetime (1771 - 1810) also dedicated to ``epic'' poetry and tireless political commentary, Brown crowded several ambitious melodramas that absorbed various European romantic influences, and foreshadowed the more accomplished ``Gothic'' fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and, eventually, Faulkner. Wieland (1798), his only widely read novel, spins from the actual story of a deranged farmer who murdered his family a gripping tale of madness complicated by the notorious ``science'' of ventriloquism. Its successors - Arthur Mervyn (1799), which vigorously dramatizes an epidemic of ``yellow fever'' in Brown's native Philadelphia, and Edgar Huntly (1799), a collection of nonstop action scenes unified by the intriguing theme of sleepwalking - are in many ways its equals. An important and long-overdue homage to one of the milestone figures of our early literary history. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

a seminal classic
Charles Brockden Brown is known as the "Father of the American novel" and is considered to be our first professional author. At least by those who do consider him at all. To be perfectly frank, I'd never really heard of the guy before now. But this excellent gothic tale, which was based on the true story of a farmer who thought that angels had commanded him to kill his own family, is so clearly the forerunner of the fiction of everyone from Hawthorne and Melville to Poe and Henry James to H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard right on up to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, that it is hard to believe that his work is not better known nor taught more often.

Wieland, his first novel, tells the story of a religious fanatic who builds a temple in the seclusion of his own farm, but then is struck dead, apparently by spontaneous combustion. Several years later, his children, in turn, begin to hear voices around the family property, voices which alternately seem to be commanding good or evil and which at times imitate denizens of the farm. Are the voices somehow connected to a mysterious visitor who has begun hanging around? Are they commands from God? From demons? Suffice it to say things get pretty dicey before we find out the truth.

This is a terrific creepy story which obviously influenced the course of American fiction. Brown develops an interesting serious theme of the role that reason can play in combating superstition and religious mania, but keeps the action cranking and the mood deliciously gloomy. The language is certainly not modern but it is accessible and generally understandable. It's a novel that should be better known and more widely read, if not for historical reasons then just because it's great fun.

GRADE: A

Almost good enough
The Library of America is providing a valuable service to all devotees of American literature by providing reliable texts of so many important American writers. Here, they have done an excellent job of presenting the three best novels of America's first professional novelist. However, Brown only wrote six novels altogether, and anyone who cares about "Wieland," "Edgar Huntly," and "Arthur Mervyn" will probably also want "Ormond" in the package, as well as the fragments "Memoirs of Stephen Calvert" and "Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist."

Dark Patriarch
I was pleased to see that the editorial review of this (typically gorgeous) Library of America series entry stole my breath. Brockden Brown's fascinating and brutal gothic novels are the true foundation of what's dark about American literature. Perhaps even more irresponsible than Poe in his fascination with the grotesque (spontaneous combustion, anyone?), Brockden Brown long anticipates Poe and Freud (and Faulkner and Jackson and ...) in his bleak explorations of our most terrible fears, and our worst secrets. Without scenes like the axe murder in "Wieland," would we have King's (or Kubrick's) "The Shining"? Impossible. Let's hope that the Library of America will add a Volume 2 to this one, including Brockden Brown's lesser known (and impossible to find) works like "Ormond."