Charles Brockden Brown 
Edgar Huntly (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading) 
Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker

Waldegrave is dead.  Murdered.  His assassin is unknown.  His friend, a young man named Edgar Huntly, desperately searches for clues to the identity of the assailant, to no avail.  Then one night, Edgar discovers a strange man digging a hole underneath the same elm tree where the slain Waldegrave was discovered.  A moment later, the stranger turns from the elm and walks deep into the tangled woods of Norwalk.  Thus begins America’s first great murder mystery. 
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) is a dark tale of frontier violence, murder, revenge, and the deep psychological obsessions that break down human rationality.  Written in the tradition of the late eighteenth-century European gothic romance, but adapted by
Brown to American themes and subjects,
Edgar Huntly is the crowning achievement of one of America’s first great novelists.

About the author

Charles Brockden Brown produced the six novels that comprise the bulk of his aesthetic offerings in a burst of creative energy lasting a mere three years.  But for that brief period, he was America’s first professional novelist, earning his living through his writing.  Born in Philadelphia on January 17, 1771, to Quaker parents, Brown first set out to study law; but found the enterprise unfulfilling and ultimately turned his attention toward the profession of letters.  In 1798 he published the first two parts of Alcuin, a dialogue in which he argues for the extension of equal rights to women.  This publication marks the beginning of Brown’s most productive phase, publishing four gothic novels in the eighteen-month span from late 1798 to early 1800: Wieland; or the Transformation, Ormond; or, the Secret Witness, Arthur Mervyn;  or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, Edgar Huntly and the second part of Arthur Mervyn.  From 1801 until his untimely death from tuberculosis in late February of 1810, Brown published and edited several magazines including The Monthly Magazine and American Review, was a frequent contributor of poems and essays to other periodicals, and spent much of his time engaged in writing political pamphlets.