Editing Charles Brockden Brown (section)

== Literary Achievement ==

Brown's major novels, produced in a remarkable burst between 1798 and 1801, established conventions that American gothic fiction would elaborate. "Wieland" (1798), involving religious fanaticism and ventriloquism, explored the dangers of misplaced faith in ways that American experience made resonant. "Edgar Huntly" (1799), featuring sleepwalking and frontier violence, used American landscape for psychological exploration that European settings could not provide. "Arthur Mervyn" (1799-1800), set during Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic, combined disease horror with social criticism.<ref name="watts"/>

His narrative innovations—unreliable narrators, psychological complexity, American settings treated seriously—anticipated developments that later writers would receive credit for pioneering. His influence on Poe, acknowledged by the later writer, and on Hawthorne demonstrates that his work, though commercially unsuccessful, entered the American literary tradition through writers who recognized his achievement. His Philadelphia settings, particularly the yellow fever sequences, provided local specificity that gave his work authenticity absent from imitative fiction.<ref name="kafer"/>

His magazine editing and political writing, which occupied his later years as novel-writing ceased, demonstrated literary abilities applied to different forms. The financial difficulties that plagued his career, leading to his return to mercantile employment, illustrated the era's obstacles to professional authorship. His death from tuberculosis at age thirty-nine cut short a career whose potential his completed work suggested without fully realizing.<ref name="watts"/>