Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown ( born January 17, 1771 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, † February 22, 1810 ) was an American writer.

Biography

Brown comes from a Philadelphia-based devout Quaker family, which provided a legal education for him. However, after a short time Brown was already on its position as an assistant to a lawyer to be able to fully concentrate on writing can. His first works were published in Columbia Magazine. His first book, published in 1798 " Alcuin: a Dialogue" sat down, influenced by William Godwin, with the rights of women apart.

" Wieland, or the Transformation ," which appeared in the same year, was his most successful work. It describes how the main character, Theodore Wieland, in the novel, a relative of the writer Christoph Martin Wieland, driven by a ventriloquist in the delusion and the murderer is.

In 1799 he became the editor of The Monthly Magazine and American Review. In parallel, he wrote other novels first, but gave in 1803 writing fictional stories on when he founded the magazine The Literary Magazine and American Register and wanted to focus on that.

1804 married Brown. However, he fell ill with tuberculosis, of which he died at the age of 39 years 1810.

Effect

Brown is considered the greatest and most accomplished American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. Although, as is sometimes claimed by early critics, he was not the first American novelist, the scope and complexity of his work, not least because of the many genres that uses Brown as a form of expression, it has a key role in understanding the early years of the American Republic.

Works (selection)

• Wieland or the Transformation.
• Arthur Mervyn or the plague in Philadelphia.
• Ormond.
• Edgar Huntly or the somnambulist.