Brown Charles Brockden

Brown, Charles Brockden, novelist, was born in 1771, in Philadelphia. He abandoned law and devoted himself to literature, which he was the first American to adopt as a profession, his first novel, Wieland, appearing in 1798. In a later novel, Arthur Mervyn, he depicted with great force the ravages of the yellow fever in the year 1793, in Philadelphia. In addition to writing novels, he started and edited several American periodicals. He died in 1810 of consumption.