Brown, Charles Brockden

Charles Brockden Brown was an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period. He is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. Brown is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel" and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture. Brown's novels are often characterized as Gothic fiction, although the model he develops is far from the Gothic romance mode of writers such as Ann Radcliffe. Wieland is the first as well as the most famo...