The founding father of American literature, Charles Brockden Brown saw his nation's dark side

Murder, suicide, spontaneous combustion, sleepwalking, ventriloquism: These are some of the sensational events in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810). As the United States' first professional author, Brown is the Founding Father of the nation's literature. He is, according to one biographer, "the most important American author no one has ever heard of." His fiction was deeply engaged with politics and culture after the American Revolution.