Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was an American novelist, editor and historian, often called the first professional man of letters in the United States. Born to a Quaker family in Philadelphia, he gave up law for writing and, between 1798 and 1801, published a series of novels, among them Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly, which transplanted the Gothic novel to American settings, with ventriloquism, sleepwalking, epidemics and the wilderness in place of castles. He later edited magazines and wrote on politics. His work influenced Poe, Hawthorne and Mary Shelley.