Charles Frederick Briggs--novelist, satirist, realist, critic, and journalist--wrote four novels set in New York City and at sea. He wrote three of them--The Adventures of Harry Franco, A Tale of the Great Panic (1839), Working a Passage; or, Life in a Liner (1844, 1846), and The Trippings of Tom Pepper; or, The Results of Romancing. An Autobiography (1847, 1850)--in his characteristic comic mode, and the fourth, Bankrupt Stories (1843), in an unexpected tragic vein. He was also a forerunner and champion of Herman Melville, first an editorial partner and then an opponent of Edgar Allan Poe, a literary confidant of James Russell Lowell, and an editor of Putnam's Magazine, The New York Times, and other periodicals. In an era of American nationalism and literary romanticism, he depicted contemporary social injustice in a startling manner by consciously modeling his work after Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. Perry Miller has described Briggs...