Edgar Huntly (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker

By Charles Brockden Brown and Eric Carl Link

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.  Waldegrave is dead.  Murdered.  His assassin is unknown.  His friend, a young man named Edgar Huntly, desperately searches for clues to the identity of the assailant, to no avail.  Then one night, Edgar discovers a strange man digging a hole underneath the same elm tree where the slain Waldegrave was discovered.  A moment later, the stranger turns from the elm and walks deep into the tangled woods of Norwalk.  Thus begins America’s first great murder mystery.  Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) is a dark tale of frontier violence, murder, revenge, and the deep psychological obsessions that break down human rationality.  Written in the tradition of the late eighteenth-century European gothic romance, but adapted by Brown to American themes and subjects, Edgar Huntly is the crowning achievement of one of America’s first great novelists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467859

Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was an American novelist and historian. Born to a family of Quakers in Philadelphia, Brown studied as a lawyer before embarking on a literary career. Alongside his work as a successful author of novels, short stories, essays, and poetry, Brown was a well-regarded editor and public intellectual. He was heavily influenced by British radicals of the French Revolutionary period, including Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and became an important figure both in the developing American literary scene and for such writers as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. His style exhibits a profound understanding of Gothic fiction and radical democratic politics, and his works incorporate elements of sentimental fiction, the captivity narrative, and epistolary form in their composition. Although he was far from the only writer working in early America, his critical acclaim and popular success certainly make him one of the most important. Brown’s brief but productive career earned the admiration of Walter Scott, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, all of whom he inspired and influenced.

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