The American novelist and magazine editor Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was a predecessor of Edgar Allan Poe in horror fiction and a critic of contemporary literature.

Charles Brockden Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on Jan. 17, 1771, the fifth son of Elijah and Elizabeth Armitt Brown, wealthy and liberal Quakers. Charles attended the Friends' Latin School, began the study of law, but soon gave evidence of the traits of melancholy, an interest in morbid psychology, and a commitment to literature that governed all of his short life.

With the brilliant and gifted Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith, the dramatist William Dunlap, and others, Brown formed literary and scientific clubs in Philadelphia and New York to discuss current ideas and issues. This intellectual sociability, however, provided only interludes between long periods of introspective retreat when he read widely and wrote with almost fanatic intensity.

Brown was deeply affected by the yellow...