Brown, Charles Brockden

Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (Penguin Classics)

Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Penguin Classics)

The ensuing day was spent, partly in sleep, and partly in languor and disquietude. I incessantly ruminated on the incidents of the last night. The scheme that I had formed was defeated. Was it likely that this unknown person would repeat his midnight visits to the Elm? If he did, and could again be discovered, should I resolve to undertake a new pursuit, which might terminate abortively, or in some signal disaster? But what proof had I that the same rout would be taken, and that he would again inter himself alive in the same spot?

The ensuing day was spent, partly in sleep, and partly in languor and disquietude. I incessantly ruminated on the incidents of the last night. The scheme that I had formed was defeated. Was it likely that this unknown person would repeat his midnight visits to the Elm? If he did, and could again be discovered, should I resolve to undertake a new pursuit, which might terminate abortively, or in some signal disaster? But what proof had I that the same rout would be taken, and that he would again inter himself alive in the same spot?

Charles Brockden Brown : Three Gothic Novels : Wieland / Arthur Mervyn / Edgar Huntly (Library of America)

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?

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.

Arthur Mervyn Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793: With Related Texts

Set during the epic Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Charles Brockden Brown's classic gothic novel Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 connects the outbreak with the upheavals of the revolutionary era and the murderous financial networks of Atlantic slavery.

This edition of Arthur Mervyn offers selections from key contemporary texts as well as excerpts from Brown's own writings on slavery, race, and the uses of history in fiction.

Arthur Mervyn

When Dr. Stevens finds a young man sitting alone in Phildelphia, he takes pity on him and invites him into his home. The young man's name is Arthur Mervyn and he is suffering from yellow fever, an illness that has swept through the city. In Dr. Stevens' care, Arthur becomes well again. Arthur is a pleasant man and they spend many hours discussing the future. However, when Mr. Whortley visits Dr. Stevens and recognizes Arthur, the serene life that was so hoped for by Arthur is brought into turmoil. For Arthur's past is not one of innocence, but one involving swindlers and lost monies. And Dr. Stevens must decide if Arthur deserves another chance at improving a wretched life.

Charles Brockden Brown is considered the man who brought Gothic literature to America. Before him, Gothic novels were set in European ruined castles and moors. Brown brought them to the towns and villages of America, but retained the Gothic feel that people of the time enjoyed so much. Arthur Mervyn was one of his most popular novels.

Wieland: Or The Transformation: With Memoirs Of Carwin The Biloquist: A Fragment

Wieland, or the Transformation (Literary Classics Series)

A shadow falls over the Enlightenment when a stranger pays a visit in this tale of one family's slide down the slippery slope of reality. Featuring spontaneous combustion, demonic ventriloquism, murder and madness, Wieland offers a wealth of high weirdness for fans of the paranormal. The Invisible College Press is pleased to resurrect this forgotten classic of dark literature.

Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (Dodo Press)

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel, " or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and 1800s, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution. Among his works are: Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), Jane Talbot (1801), Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803-1805), and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799/1800).

It was plain that some connection subsisted between her and Welbeck. Would she drop the subject at the point which it had now attained? Would she cease to exert herself to extract from me the desired information, or would she not rather make Welbeck a party in the cause, and prejudice my new friend against me? This was an evil proper, by all lawful means, to avoid. I knew of no other expedient than to confess to him the truth, with regard to Clavering, and explain to him the dilemma in which my adherence to my promise had involved me.

CLASSIC HORROR WRITERS.

Wieland

"A light proceeding from the edifice made every part of the scene visible. A gleam diffused itself over the intermediate space, and instantly a loud report, like the explosion of a mine, followed. She uttered an involuntary shriek, but the new sounds that greeted her ear, quickly conquered her surprise. They were piercing shrieks, and uttered without intermission. The gleams which had diffused themselves far and wide were in a moment withdrawn, but the interior of the edifice was filled with rays."

-- From Weiland, by Charles Brockden Brown -- a seminal work both of American literature and the literature of the weird.