Arthur Mervyn

[Brown, Charles Brockden] Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. By the Author of Wieland; and Ormond, or The Secret Witness.

Contemporary tree sheep, re-backed with period gilt ruled spine, red morocco spine label. Phila.: Printed and Published by H. Maxwell, 1799

First edition.

Charles Brockden Brown is considered the first American novelist. This is the author's second novel, after Wieland (1798).

"In Arthur Mervyn, Brown managed to give a sense of the horror of silent streets disturbed only by the rattling of the dead cart, of the terror of empty houses abandoned to the dead and the dying, of the atmosphere of disease and death hanging over the panic-stricken city in which neither food nor shelter could be bought. He describes the flight of the living, the atrocities of the hospital, and the hearse men dragging out the still breathing bodies, and illustrates the general desolation by the experiences of Arthur who, attacked by the fever, could only drag himself to a deserted house to die out of reach of the hospital cart. Brown's descriptions are of an unshrinking realism, he never trusts in suggestion or in the Imagination of his reader, and yet from his loathsome catalogue of disgusting details there results an effect of simple horror."--Loshe,

The Early American Novel. A very good or better copy.

From Catalog I

The first professional American novelist sets his second book inside the epidemic, and produces the most vivid document of what 1793 Philadelphia felt like from the ground. Brown had been there. His descriptions -- Loshe called them "unshrinking realism" -- are the medical controversy's emotional reality: not positions in a pamphlet war but the actual experience of a city learning to die. Traded for S. Weir Mitchell books.