He was born in Philadelphia, on January 17, 1771, into an old Quaker family. Brown was the youngest of four sons. Through out his childhood and his life he was most often sick. Being physically weak Brown was very strong in his studies. He went to Friends" Grammar School. There he acquired a broad classical education. Basically all Brown did as a child was read and he was very smart. When he was 10 he said, "Why does he call me boy?" referring to a visitor, who had just left the room, "does he not know that it is neither size nor age, but understanding, that makes the man? I could ask him an hundred questions, none of which he could answer." By the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to Alexander Wilcox to study law. But Brown had other interests. While still in his teens he was contributing essays to the Colombian Magazine. .
At age 22 he had decided to completely give law up and devote his time to literature. He moved to New York and became a member of "The Friendly Society", which was just a weekly meeting of the leading writers and scientific men of the city. While there he met William Godwin. Who influenced Brown majorly with his ideas of corruption of society and of the perfectibility of humankind. .
Brown then moved back to Philadelphia and published his first book, "Alcuin: A Dialogue on the Rights of Woman", at the age of 27. It was a plea for woman's rights far before its time. In this same year 1798 he published his first novel "Wieland: Or the Transformation." Everett A. Duycknick, a critic of this book wrote in 1856, "Due credit must at the same time be given to him (Brown) for resolution and bravery. He was not only the first person in America who ventured to pursue literature as a profession, but almost the first to make an attempt in the field of imaginative writing, disconnected with the advocacy of any question of national or local interest." Soon after Brown returned to New York and became an editor of the Monthly Magazine and American Review.
In this light "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" can be seen to reflect concerns that also color the work of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, about the potential within a transient democratic society for people to be swayed by charismatic voices, by stories that may or may not be true. ...
The differences, as Browning fully realized in The Ring and the Book(1868-69), provide for powerful ironic tensions. Over and over again, in Browning's poem, the story is told of what happened on the fatal night when Count Guido Franceschini went in seach of his seventeen-year-old bride Pompilia who, in the company of the handsome young priest Giuseppe Caponsacchi, had runaway from his ancient villa and returned home to her parents in Rome. ... Although Browning allows the Pope to serve as arbiter, he also effectively undermines confidence in testimony. ... Charles Brockden Brown's A...
A marked out in line of dull red light."52 Many other people of the town see it as well, but each interprets it to his own liking, never once suggesting that it may just simply be a meteor.53 With the Age of Reason on the horizon in the late 18th century-early nineteenth century, "the area of the unknown [is] steadily contracting,"54 but "it has always existed, and it will always exist."55 America's first professional writer, Charles Brockden Brown, has a deep attraction...
