Charles Brockden Brown is best known as America's first professional man of letters, a novelist, publisher, and editor whose morally earnest Gothic tales attracted the attention of Keats and Shelley abroad and, among others, Poe and Hawthorne at home. His career as a novelist was brief and intense and, by comparison with his American contemporaries, brilliant (four extraordinary and two rather mundane novels published between 1798 and 1801). Between 1799 and his death in 1810 he also published, edited, and was frequently a major contributor to three different magazines. He has been described by David Lee Clark in Charles Brockden Brown, Pioneer Voice of America (1952) as "the greatest critic in America before Edgar Allen Poe," but such a high estimate of his importance as a critic is not widely shared. None of his novels was wholly an artistic success, and none of his journals or novels was a commercial success. Nor did...