Edgar Huntley Memoirs of a Sleep Walker: An Early American Gothic Novel of Sleepwalking, Wilderness, and Psychological Terror

Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker is a landmark of early American Gothic fiction and one of Charles Brockden Brown's most important novels. Set in rural Pennsylvania in the years after the American Revolution, the novel follows Edgar Huntly as he investigates the murder of his friend and is drawn into a dark world of sleepwalking, wilderness terror, psychological uncertainty, pursuit, violence, and moral confusion. First published in 1799, the book helped establish a distinctly American Gothic mode, replacing European castles and old-world superstition with caves, forests, frontier anxiety, unstable perception, and the hidden violence of the new republic. Brown's novel is remarkable for the way it anticipates later American fiction: the divided self, unreliable consciousness, dreamlike action, buried guilt, and the fear that reason may not govern human conduct. Its atmosphere of darkness and pursuit points toward Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and later psychological fiction, while its frontier setting gives the Gothic novel a recognisably American landscape. For readers of classic American literature, Gothic fiction, psychological novels, early American fiction, and the origins of American horror, Edgar Huntly remains a strange, forceful, and historically important work. Read more