A scholar at Georgetown University has noted that undergraduate students often say that Brown reminds them of Poe – before realizing that Brown plied his wordcraft a generation before Poe. “His Gothic romances in American settings were the first in a tradition adapted by two of the greatest early American authors, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne”-1911 Britannica. “Brown saw this opportunity for creating a purely American fiction, and he seized it.”-Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice in America, Clark, 1952, p. biography (book accompanies lot) writes of these crossroads in Brown’s life: “Without money and the necessities of life.Brown stood firm in his conviction that he was right.the persistent inner urge to become an author by profession.” Indeed, Brown would become the Father of American Fiction - the first professional, successful American novelist - and the ”first American writer to develop an international reputation”. (Brown is even speculated to have been an initial inspiration for Poe’s move to Philadelphia. Indeed, Brown’s incipient works of fright and horror were later credited by Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, and Frankenstein’s Shelley as influencing their own styles. Penned at just 21 years of age, while unhappily employed as a legal apprentice, near the precipice of committing to a literary life, here hinting at the gloomy tone of his writings. To fellow Quaker William Wood Wilkins, his closest early friend, sharing local lodgings with Brown in 1791-92. of Charles Brocken Brown, Philadelphia, Dec.
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