Orestes Augustus Brownson

Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–1876) was an American writer and controversialist from Vermont who passed through Presbyterianism, Universalism, Unitarianism, socialism and Transcendentalism before entering the Roman Catholic Church in 1844 and becoming its most combative intellectual voice in the United States. For nearly forty years he filled his one-man periodical, Brownson's Quarterly Review, with essays on philosophy, politics and theology, and he quarreled with almost everyone, including his fellow Catholics. The Spirit-Rapper of 1854 is his only work of fiction, an attack on spiritualism in the form of a confession, and The American Republic of 1865 is his principal political treatise.