Kent State University. Institute for Bibliography and Editing.

Charles Brockden Brown is generally considered America's first professional novelist, although he wrote short stories, essays, and political pamphlets and was also the editor of several early American magazines. Raised a Quaker in Philadelphia, he disappointed his family when he left a budding legal career to pursue writing full time in 1793. He moved to New York in 1798 to be near his literary friends. After surviving the yellow fever epidemic, he wrote his four major novels--Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly--in an eighteen-month period. Unable to sustain himself, he returned to Philadelphia in 1800, where he worked for his family business and as an editor. He married Elizabeth Linn in 1804; she and their four children survived him when he died in 1810.

Daniel Edwards Kennedy was a scholar who became interested in Charles Brockden Brown in 1906 while working on his M.A. from Yale. Kennedy determined to write a biography of Brown, but the massive manuscript, completed mostly between 1917 and 1948, was never published. Kennedy's manuscript biography of Charles Brockden Brown was a major source for the critical edition of Brown's works.