Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was born to a Quaker family in Philadelphia, grew up amidst the pandemonium of the American Revolution, and emerged as America’s first professional novelist.  Between 1798 and 1801 he produced five novels in addition to Wieland, a book-length feminist dialogue (Alcuin), and the celebrated adventure tale Edgar Huntly.  His fiction was admired by many contemporaries including such Romantics as Percy Shelley, William Godwin, and John Keats, and served as a major influence to his literary successors Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fennimore Cooper, and Edgar Allen Poe.