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Article: The Man Who Invented American Gothic.(Charles Brockden Brown created American fiction of horror and the supernatural)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Insight on the News
- Article date:
- January 11, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 News World Communications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Although his name may be forgotten, 18th-century author Charles Brockden Brown is crucial to American fiction and to the evolving literature of horror and the supernatural.
A man spontaneously bursts into flames. Disembodied voices speak from a closet. Religious mania incites the murder of innocents. This is not a new novel by Stephen King, but a 200-year-old book: Wieland, or The Transformation, the first novel by America's first professional writer, Charles Brockden Brown.
Twenty years before Washington Irving's Sketch Book -- and decades before Edgar Allan Poe's first short story -- Brown abandoned a legal career to champion a new and uniquely ...