It was a major literary feat for Charles Brockden Brown to establish himself as an independent man of letters. In late eighteenth-century America, novel writing was not considered a gentleman's occupation.
Brown, who grew up in Philadelphia in a Quaker family, was a sickly child and a passionate reader. His thinking was influenced by the revolutionary politics of the age, by the writings of William Godwin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Drawn to New York and the promise of a more lively intellectual climate, he set out in the course of two frenetic years to write four novels. Wieland was published in 1798, Ormond and Edgar Huntley in 1799, Arthur Mervyn in 1799 and 1800. "This employment," he explained to a friend, "was just as necessary to my mind as sustenance to my frame. Had I been exiled [to Kamschatka] I must have written as a mental necessity, and in it I have still found my highest enjoyment."
Wieland, the first American novel in the Gothic tradition, narrates one man's descent into madness. Influenced by religious voices and an evil ventriloquist, Theodore Wieland murders his wife and children. The plot is based on the case of an actual religious fanatic in New York State. The novel reflects the social and political anxieties of the age. Brown's work also prefigures aspects of Poe and Hawthorne. In an ominous landscape his characters live a doomed existence.
Shelley, who was spellbound by the sinister tale, searched for a summerhouse like the one described in the novel where an act of spontaneous combustion kills Wieland's father.
In spite of modest critical acclaim, financial success eluded Brown. He became the editor of a new magazine which failed and entered business to support his growing family. When told that two acts of a tragedy he had written were not promising, he burned the manuscript and preserved the ashes in a snuff-box.
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