Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia in 1771 into a Quaker family of merchants. Set to study law in 1787, he gave it up in 1793 to live by his pen. In New York, he frequented a circle of young men of letters, where his friends included the physician Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap, and he fed on the ideas of the English radical William Godwin. He published six novels in about four years, then edited journals in Philadelphia and joined his brothers' trading house. He died in Philadelphia in February 1810, aged thirty-nine.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelEdgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-WalkerCharles Brockden Brown · 1799LiteraturePublic domain