Charles Brockden Brown: A Study of Early American Fiction

Mr. Vilas has given us an exhaustive study of the work of Charles Brockden Brown, and his criticism is in the main sound and impartial. It is not likely that popular interest will ever be renewed in the morbid and sentimental fiction of Brown, but it is well that the student of American literature should be able to learn somewhat about the work of one who has been called the first really professional American man of letters. We feel inclined to take issue with Mr. Vilas upon his statement that Brockden Brown "deserves the place of first American novelist and romancer." Although Brown's novels locate their plots in America, they are not American in the sense that Cooper's tales and Hawthome's "Scarlet Letter' are. They are only echoes of Old World conditions, and would be just the same if located in Ruritania.

-Current Opinion, Volume 38 [1905]