SOURCE: "Brockden Brown: The Politics of the Man of Letters," in The Serif: Kent State University Library Quarterly, Vol. III, No. 4, December, 1966, pp. 3-11.

In the following essay, Berthoff surveys Brown 's political philosophy as exhibited in his novels and maintains that it remained consistent throughout his literary career. Berthoff explains that Brown's political theory centered on human personality and self-fulfillment as ways of evaluating the problems of the state; in Brown's earlier novels he focuses on the potential destructiveness of self-interest, while in his later novels, Brown emphasizes the success of self-interest.

Charles Brockden Brown's last two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, were published in 1801. Their general feebleness seems to anticipate directly his abandonment of the novel as a literary instrument. Actually these books, epistolary in form, are in some ways more competently executed than the four better-known novels Brown had rushed into print in the...