Fire (circa 1805), William Blake, The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons.

The philosopher’s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius—mystic, monastic, and magician—supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708. But rather than letting it be acquired by less reputable occultists, he dispatched a confidant to throw it from Germantown’s banks deep into the water of the Wissahickon Creek or the Schuylkill, depending on which account you believe. The German-speaking Transylvanian was a character from a gothic novel—an apocalyptic wizard who (so it was claimed) lived in a cave where he transformed “darkness into light, death into life,” and “metals into gold.” 

At the very end of that revolutionary century another Philadelphian had similar occult ambitions, albeit of a literary sort, in generating something new and glowing from the base materials of gothic literature. Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale—frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States—begins with a religious iconoclast not unlike Kelpius who spontaneously combusts while worshiping in a temple overlooking the Schuylkill. Brown describes how a “faint gleam suddenly shot athwart” the temple, seemingly the result of some occult experimentation. “In a moment,” he wrote, “the whole was reduced to ashes.”

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the explosion of the temple by the Schuylkill, there was more of America than just in the parallels to religious renegades like Kelpius. For Brown, Wieland wasn’t simply a European novel set in the New World, but a different type of work entirely. The author castigated his contemporaries across the Atlantic for their reliance on “puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimerical shadows.”  Indeed, what he sought in Wieland was a kind of hyperrationalism—as many of that tale’s mysteries are subsequently explained. Wieland then was an act of clearing the brush for new plants to grow, where the temple’s immolation mirrored the writer’s desire to burn away European antecedents. As Brown wrote, “Why then slumbers the American muse?”   

Wieland is an odd book (albeit a good one). Though Brown declared independence from European culture, the influence of popular gothic tropes are obvious. It doesn’t even have the weirdest opening of that genre—in the first few pages of the English novelist Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, from 1764, a character is pulverized by a giant helmet that mysteriously falls from the sky. Brown’s novel, however, is gothic in a manner that could only be American, and one particular to the mid-Atlantic, where eccentric sects proliferated, including Anabaptists, Moravians, the Ephrata Community, and Kelpius’s own apocalyptic, cave-dwelling “Society of the Woman in the Wilderness.”

Brown trades in gothic subjects as varied as somnambulism, ventriloquism, and spontaneous combustion. But his main concern is very much that American contradiction between the cool rationalism of our founding documents and the fervent irrationalism of our national character. Brown was strung between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. He was born in a city that was the exemplar of the former—Benjamin Franklin’s adopted hometown—five years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. But Pennsylvania was also where a grimoire called The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses numbered among the first books ever printed in the colony, a place whose countryside—the setting for all of Brown’s novels—was (and is) filled with barns affixed with colorful, geometric hex signs to ward off curses. The inherent tension between these two traditions might be most bluntly expressed in Wieland’s eponymous character (the son of the unfortunate combustible), who begins murdering at the behest of unseen commentators, which are later revealed to be the commands of a huckster capable of throwing his voice. In Brown’s most influential novel, in other words, a (European) father’s demise is facilitated through magic, but that of his son is explained through science. 

Brown desired books that reflect American “skies, which give us the varied and kind return of seasons,” and  “mountains which furnish us with all that is grand and elevating.” Marveling at the muse of landscape, Brown hoped that Americans would “blow the spark of genius into flame.” If Brown fancied himself the first spark, then he never became part of that great conflagration, not having reached the stature of later authors like Washington Irving or James Fenimore Cooper, much less the apogee of the American Renaissance embodied by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville. Championed by Edgar Allan Poe and John Keats, he was hardly an unknown in his time; in 1808, he became the first American novelist to be translated into a foreign language. In a series of 1824 essays from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the writer John Neal included Brown and himself among a shortlist of the first Americans “who could look upon literature, as a profession.” But two centuries later, how many Americans know who Brown is, much less Neal?    

Regardless, Brown is certainly familiar to literary scholars of the time period, as his major works like Wieland and his 1799 follow-up, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-walker, remain in print, while the former was adapted for a 2024 film and Sara Sligar’s 2025 novel Vantage Point, a cheeky modernization which trades the hustler’s ventriloquism for deepfake technology. Even if largely unknown, there is a mesmerizing pull to Brown for those who have read his work, described by Philip Gura in Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel as an oeuvre that “explored the limits of rationality, emphasizing the random irruption of the irrational into even the most settled lives.” A concise explication of America: a nation that was enacted through the sober prose of legal documents and constructed through the barbarity of enslavement and genocide, our own ghost story. 

By that accounting, Edgar Huntly was the more authentic “American Tale.” The narrative begins with the titular protagonist stalking a suspected murderer through the wilderness. When Edgar demands  a confession, the suspect (a somnambulist with the fantastically gothic name of Clithero) denies committing that particular murder, but instead guiltily admits that he believes himself to have killed a woman in his native Ireland (a confession seemingly unrelated to the suspect’s own sleepwalking). Halfway through the novel, after these strange interactions, Edgar awakens in a cave confused as to how he has arrived there, finally concluding that, like Clithero, he is also a somnambulist. Then in the darkness, Edgar is attacked by a panther, which he brutally kills with his bare hands, ravenously eating its flesh and drinking its blood as a frenzied, intoxicated blood sacrifice. Emerging from the cave, Edgar comes upon a group of Lenni Lenape, whom he similarly murders in an act of superhuman strength. “I was the instrument of their destruction,” reflects Edgar, this “scene of carnage and blood was laid to me.”

Edgar Huntly begins as a conventional gothic novel only to become a violent, psychedelic, American phantasmagoria—less Ann Radcliffe than Cormac McCarthy. It is consummately American in its expressions of our national contradiction, our ignorant sleepwalking through history, and our collective amnesia as to how we’ve arrived at the present. What is the United States, after all, other than a massive, haunted graveyard? Brown may have been a literary nationalist, but he was an honest one—the first American novelist mostly in that the brutal reality of Edgar Huntly prophetically anticipates those of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. His is an interrogation of the American paradox, of cankerous irrationalism gilded in reason, a reality often ignored, denied, or obscured. When Brown completed Wieland he sent a copy to Vice President Thomas Jefferson “to intreat his acceptance of the volume.” Mr. Jefferson responded with a polite thank you from which it was clear that he hadn’t bothered to read it.  

Ed Simon is the author of several books, including Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, named one of  The New Yorker’s best books of 2024 and most recently American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America. He is Public Humanities Lecturer in English at Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books.