Kent State University. Institute for Bibliography and Editing.

The Institute for Bibliography and Editing (IBE), was founded in 1965 by Dr. Sydney Krause and, prior to 1986, was known as the Bibliographical and Textual Center. Located on the 11th floor of the main library on the Kent State University campus, the Institute produces definitive editions of works of prominent authors. Scholars and trained students work together using methods of bibliography and textual criticism with the help of advanced computer technology in textual collation, processing, and production. A major accomplishment of the Institute has been the complete works of Charles Brockden Brown and current projects include the works of Joseph Conrad and the Taft papers.

From the description of Records, 1966- [ongoing]. (Kent State University). WorldCat record id: 48445601

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 nearer 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 from tuberculosis in 1810.

Daniel Edwards Kennedy was a twentieth century scholar whose unpublished manuscript biography of Brown was a major source for the Bicentennial Edition. Kennedy was independently wealthy and established a print shop in his Chestnut Hill, MA home. While working on his M.A. (1906) in abstentia from Yale, Kennedy became interested in Brown. His library, which has been called “one of the most extraordinary collections of American literature ever formed” (Stoddard 11), featured the most comprehensive Brown holdings of his time. Kennedy determined to write a biography of Brown, but the massive manuscript, completed mostly between 1917 and 1948, was never published. After he died in 1960, Kennedy's children sold his library. The manuscript for Charles Brockden Brown: His Life and Works was purchased by the Kent State Bibliographical and Textual Center in 1966.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) (detailed biography note)

Charles Brockden Brown is generally considered the first American novelist, although he also wrote short stories, essays, and political pamphlets. Noted for his international audience and his attempt to support himself solely on writing, Brown is often considered the first professional American author (Mullane 1). He was heavily influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women and William Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Dewsbury 1).Brown was born in Philadelphia on January 17, 1771 to Elijah and Mary Armitt Brown. His parents were pacifist Quakers and he attended Robert Proud's Philadelphia Friends Latin School from the ages of eleven to sixteen. Throughout his life, Brown was regularly ill and chronically depressed.

Encouraged by his family, Brown began apprenticing under the prominent Philadelphia lawyer Alexander Wilcox in 1787. While pursuing a legal career, Brown founded the Belles Lettres Club with his friends William Wood Wilkins and Joseph Bringhurst. In 1789, at the age of eighteen, Brown published the "Rhapsodist" sketches, his first literary works. After six years with Wilcox's firm, Brown left his apprenticeship to try to make a living as a writer, claiming to be "perpetually encumbered by the law" (quoted in Warfel 29).

Initially, Brown wrote but did not publish much. During this period, Brown met William Dunlap and other members of the New York literary society the Friendly Club through Elihu Hubbard Smith, Brown's "closest friend and patron" (Chapman). Brown read his own works-in-progress to Friendly Club members during 1796 and 1797. In early 1798, he published several works including Alcuin, the dialogue on women's rights, and his serial story "The Man at Home."

Brown had traveled between New York and Philadelphia for years, finally moving to New York with Smith during the yellow fever epidemic of July 1798. Unlike his friend and fellow lodger, who died suddenly in September 1798, Brown survived. After Smith's death, "Brown began a frantic period of writing novels (Chapman). He wrote his four major novels - Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly - in this eighteen month period.

After publishing Part Two of Arthur Mervyn in 1800 and moving back to Philadelphia, Brown "decided abruptly not to write any more novels" (Chapman). Brown was unable to support himself solely as a writer, so he joined the family mercantile business in 1800. Although he did finish the two sentimental novels Clara Howard and Jane Talbot (both were published in 1801), Mary Chapman argues that after 1800, Brown transitioned from a novelist to an editor and journalist (Chapman).

In April 1799, Brown had been chosen to be editor of the Friendly Club's Monthly Magazine, and American Review, which became the American Review, and Literary Journal in 1801. In 1803, Brown began editing The Literary Magazine, and American Register for Joseph Conrad. Brown then started the American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science in 1807.

Chapman also notes more personal transformations around the turn of the century, including a "change in his philosophical outlook from religious questioner to orthodox Christian" and Brown's shift from a youthful pro-Jeffersonian among Federalists to a critic of the third president (Chapman).

Brown married Elizabeth Linn on November 19, 1804, with whom he had three sons and a daughter. Her brother was Brown's friend, the Presbyterian minister John Blair Linn. Brown died on February 22, 1810 from advanced tuberculosis.

Daniel Edwards Kennedy (1897-1960) (detailed biography note)

Daniel Edwards Kennedy was born in Brooklyn on August 29, 1897. Kennedy entered Yale in 1903, where he studied under William Lyon Phelps. After graduation he married and, having received a generous inheritance that granted him financial independence, he established a print shop in the basement of his Chestnut Hill, MA home. In 1906, Yale granted him an M.A. in abstentia for his thesis "The Origin and Development of the English Novel" written under Phelps. According to Roger Stoddard, the former Assistant to the Librarian at Harvard’s Houghton Library, it was during this time that Kennedy "discovered Charles Brockden Brown and determined to write a critical biography” (Stoddard 13). Robert Hemenway, who worked in the Bibliographical and Textual Center as a Kent State doctoral candidate, reveals that Kennedy “felt [Brown] had been unjustly neglected by the historians of American literature” (Hemenway 16-17). The 635,000 word manuscript for Charles Brockden Brown: His Life and Works was never ready for publication, but because “Kennedy discovered – apparently by himself – almost all the original sources” documenting Brown’s life, the unpublished biography proved “invaluable” to the editors of the Bicentennial Edition (Hemenway 17).

Stoddard explains that because “there were no institutional collections of American literature” at the time, “the student of an early American novelist had to collect his own materials, so Kennedy set out to build a library” (13). Highlights of what Stoddard called “one of the most extraordinary collections of American literature ever formed” (11) include two Alcuin pamphlets obtained from Anna Robeson Burr, a descendant of Brown; a copy of the obscure Clara Howard which had belonged to Susan Linn, Brown’s sister-in-law; an unrecorded prospectus for American Review; four Brown letters; and three books from Brown’s library. After suffering losses in the Great Depression, Kennedy sold many of his books. When Kennedy, who "became quite a recluse" (Stoddard 16), died on January 8, 1960, his children sold the remainder of his library to the Seven Gables bookshop.

The Bibliographical and Textual Center purchased the Kennedy manuscript in 1966. Letters documenting this transaction are available in Box 12, Folder 1. For full list of works cited, please see this finding aid's Bibliography.

From the guide to the Charles Brockden Brown Bicentennial Edition records, 1689-1995, 1917-1995, (Kent State University Libraries. Special Collections and Archives.)