Happy birthday, Charles Brockden Brown.

Charles Brockden Brown.
NYPL.

Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown, who may be the first professional writer in the United States, was born today in Philadelphia in 1771. His best-known novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), was praised by James Fenimore Cooper in 1827 as "a never-failing evidence of genius." He died in 1810.

A Boston murder; the pioneering Gothic career of Charles Brockden Brown.

Charles Brockden Brown.
NYPL.

NEH's Humanities Magazine discusses an 1849 murder of a Harvard-educated doctor in Boston and Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), who may be the first professional writer in the United States. (You can also check out Brown's works in the Library Company of Philadelphia's online exhibition "Philadelphia Gothic").

(Hat tip to the AHA blog)

Philadelphia Gothic exhibition.

The Library Company's online exhibition "Philadelphia Gothic: Murders, Mysteries, Monsters, and Mayhem Inspire American Fiction 1798–1854" examines that city's contributions to literary "lurid crime" and includes sections on Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, and Aaron Burr associate Leonora Sansay (more on Sansay here). Two podcasts associated with the exhibition can be found here.

About the image: Author-journalist George Lippard, ca. 1850. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.