Back Three Gothic Novels

Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels

Wieland; or The Transformation | Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 | Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker

Edited by Sydney Krause

“An important and long-overdue homage to one of the milestone figures of our early literary history.” — Kirkus Reviews

Overview
News & Views

Overview

Interviews The Other American Gothic: Director Cody Knotts on Adapting Charles Brockden Brown’s Macabre Masterpiece for Film
June 13, 2023

Interviews Science fiction authority presents a Universe-expanding exhibition in New York City
March 2, 2018

Story of the Week Charles Brockden Brown, “Somnambulism”
May 19, 2016

An elderly mystic dies of spontaneous combustion in a secret temple. A young man is haunted by voices instructing him to slaughter his wife and children. A morose immigrant is suspected of a brutal murder. A sleepwalker undergoes a series of violent adventures in the wilderness. An innocent youth is caught up in the machinations of a vicious professional criminal. A fatal epidemic sweeps through an American city.

These haunted, dreamlike scenes define the fictional world of Charles Brockden Brown, America’s first professional novelist. Published in the final years of the eighteenth century, Brown’s startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual résumé 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 and settlement alike.

Written in a nervous and effusive style in which rational discourse and hysterical rant contend for control, often narrated by characters on the brink of emotional breakdown, these are works that open onto dark recesses and turbulent conflict in the young American nation.

In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown’s works. Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, is often considered his masterpiece. A relentlessly dark exploration of guilt, deception, and compulsion, it creates a sustained mood of irrational terror in the midst of the Pennsylvania countryside.

In Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Brown draws on his own experience to create indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, while telling the story of a young man caught in the snares of a professional swindler.

Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American wilderness, in a series of eerily unreal adventures that test the limits of the protagonist’s self-knowledge.

All three novels reveal Brown as the pioneer of a major vein of American writing, a novelist whose literary heirs include Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and the whole tradition of horror and noir from Cornell Woolrich to Stephen King.

This volume also includes a newly researched chronology of Brown’s life, explanatory notes, and an essay on the texts.

Sydney J. Krause, volume editor, is professor emeritus of English at Kent State University, and general editor of the Kent State University Bicentennial Edition of the multi-volume Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews The Other American Gothic: Director Cody Knotts on Adapting Charles Brockden Brown’s Macabre Masterpiece for Film
June 13, 2023

Interviews Science fiction authority presents a Universe-expanding exhibition in New York City
March 2, 2018

Story of the Week Charles Brockden Brown, “Somnambulism”
May 19, 2016

Influences Geoffrey O’Brien: The House of Walworth, American Gothic, and Gilded Age literature
November 24, 2015

28.00 List Price: $40.00 (Save: 30%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #201063

ISBN: 978-1-88301157-4 914 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 103 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps LOA N°196

American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now LOA N°197

H. P. Lovecraft: Tales LOA N°155

Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales LOA N°19

Shirley Jackson: Novels & Stories LOA N°204

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.