Wireland of the Transformation was published in 1798 and is considered to be the first American gothic novel. The novel takes place in rural Pennsylvania in the 1760's. It is based on a true story of a murder committed by an insane farmer. A flash of light killed the farmer's fanatic father and the farmer is commanded to sacrifice his wife and children by an unearthly voice. This sacrifice will be a sign of his obedience to heaven. This is not a book for the faint of heart containing such gothic elements as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism!

Charles Brockden Brown was America's first professional novelists. His best-known novel was Wireland of the Transformation. Brown's startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual resume 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. Arthur Mervyn is set during a yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. In Arthur Mervyn, Brown draws on his own experiences to create indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, while telling the story of a...

This first volume in Kent State University's Bicentennial Edition of the Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown presents critical texts of Brown's first published novel, Wieland, and of the fragment, "Carwin," which he began in 1798 as a companion-piece to his novel. The texts are based on the first printings: the book edition of Wieland printed by T. and J. Swords in New York and published there by Hocquet Caritat in 1798, and the installments of "Carwin" that appeared in the Literary Magazine in Philadelphia in 1803, 1804, and 1805. The Historical Essay by Alexander Cowie, which...

Edgar Huntly, a young man who lives with his uncle and sisters on a farm outside Philadelphia, begins the novel determined to learn who murdered his friend Waldegrave. Walking near the elm tree under which Waldegrave was killed late one night, Huntly sees Clithero, a servant from a neighboring farm, half-dressed, digging in the ground and weeping loudly. Could Clithero have done what Edgar thinks he has?

Wieland details the horrible events that befall Clara Wieland and her brother Theodores family. Clara and Theodores father was a German immigrant who founded his own religion; he came to America just before the American Revolution with the conviction to spread his religion to the indigenous people.