SOURCE: Fiedler, Leslie A. “The Beginning of the Anti-Bourgeois Sentimental Novel in America.” In Love and Death in the American Novel pp. 116-25. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.

In the following excerpt, Fiedler explores the plot and authorial intentions of Brown's The Power of Sympathy, characterizing the book as a flawed piece of writing that nonetheless deserves critical attention.

Advertised as the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, which appeared in Boston in 1789, represents a serious bid to enter the lists of literature. The strategies (and presumably the motives) of the author are a little confusing: the title page declares his book no mere fiction but an account “founded on truth,” while the pair of couplets immediately below insist that the book's aim is to “win the Mind to Sentiment and Truth”; and the elegant dedication that follows more specifically explains that...