Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)
Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia into a prosperous family at an important moment in the development of what would become the United States of America. He became an important novelist, essayist, and printer after having attempted(with ill success because of his own lack of interest) to enter the family business and then the practice of law. Brown formed a lasting acquaintance with members of a New York City literary circle made up of Federalists, and he moved to New York City for a brief time in order to nurture his writing career. His conversations with Federalist-oriented associates, including Timothy Dwight and Elihu Hubbard Smith, along with his reading the works of figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, would eventually have a significant impact upon much of Brown's writing.
The decade of the 1790s was an important period in Brown's creative life. He wrote stories and then several novels in sequence during this time. He considered women's rights in Alcuin (1798) and then turned to explorations of the imagination in several novels: Wieland, which took up the effects of ventriloquism and scientific phenomena and a critique of religious delusion; Ormond, which celebrated a central woman of high moral character who struggled against the title character, a seducer;Edgar Huntly, which was an unusual and absorbing tale about a sleep-walker; and Arthur Mervyn, which took as its focal point the Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793.
Brown turned, just before the turn into the nineteenth century, to journalism. He founded or took over several journal editorships in succession. He founded and edited The Monthly Magazine and American Review at the turn into the new century (1799-1800),and he then took up the Literary Magazine and American Register (1803-1806) and The American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1806-10). The last periodical he edited had a distinctive social and political vein not available in the earlier publications, thus signaling a shift toward different fare than that of the imagination during Brown's last years. He died of tuberculosis early in 1810.
Some of Brown's journalistic stories are printed in Early American Writings,Gen. Ed. Carla Mulford, Assoc. Eds. Angela Vietto and Amy E. Winans (Oxford University Press, 2001). One story, from a sequence originally titled "The Man at Home," appears here.