The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 87contemporary interest in such diverse topics as Indians and somnambulism. What
Brown built on this base, however, was unique: stories that were calculated to melt
down the barrier between fact and fiction by suggesting that every narrative, experi-
ence, or judgment is always and inevitably founded on quite uncertain premises and
assumptions.
Brown was read eagerly by a number of other, distinguished writers of the time,
among them Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But he never
achieved the wider popularity he desired. He wrote two other novels, Clara Howard
(1801) and Jane Talbot (1801), in an apparent attempt to exploit the growing market
for sentimental fiction. These were similarly unsuccessful. So, more and more, he
turned to journalism to earn a living. In 1799 he founded the Monthly Magazine and
American Review, which collapsed within a year. He then edited the Literary Magazine
and American Register from 1803 until 1807, which was more successful. Memoirs of
Carwin, a sequel to Wieland, began to appear in this periodical, but the story
remained unfinished at the time of his death. In the last years of his life his interest
turned more to politics and history, a shift marked by his starting the semiannual
American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science. Deprived of
the popularity and income that he craved during his lifetime, Brown has continued
to receive less than his due share of attention. This is remarkable, not least because
he anticipates so much of what was to happen in American fiction in the nineteenth
century. His fascination with aberrant psychology, deviations in human thought
and behavior, foreshadows the work of Edgar Allan Poe; so, for that matter, does his
use of slippery narrators. His use of symbolism, and his transformation of Gothic
into a strange, surreal mix of the extraordinary and the everyday, prepares the way
for the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Even his relocation of
incidents of peril and adventure to what was then the Western wilderness clears a
path for the romances of James Fenimore Cooper. Written at the turn of the century,
the four major novels of Brown look back to the founding beliefs of the early republic
and the founding patterns of the early novel. They also look forward to a more
uncertain age, when writers were forced to negotiate a whole series of crises, includ-
ing the profound moral, social, and political crisis that was to eventuate in civil war.
The subtitle of the first novel Brown ever wrote, but never published, was “The Man
Unknown to Himself.” That captures the indeterminism at the heart of his work.
It also intimates a need that was to animate so much later American writing, as it
engaged, and still does, in a quest for identity, personal and national – a way of
making the unknown known.GGray_c01.indd 87ray_c 01 .indd 87 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM