Hugh Henry Brackenridge played an important role in America's literary and social history. His career was colorful, remarkably varied, and uniquely American. An immigrant who rose from poverty to become a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, he was also a political essayist, playwright, preacher, schoolmaster, editor, minor poet, and satirical novelist. A learned classicist who longed for the coffeehouses of London, he lived and worked on the frontier, actively involving himself in the major political controversies in those turbulent times when the young democracy was struggling to define itself. His eccentric personality and the turmoil surrounding his life in politics and the law often overshadow his importance as a major literary figure in the post-Revolutionary period. Modern Chivalry, the work on which his reputation rests, is a satire on democracy, written in installments from 1792 to 1815 and containing, as the author tells us, "All of which I saw...