Known to literary history as the author of the first American novel (a claim that has on occasion been challenged), William Hill Brown was also a poet, essayist, and dramatist of some contemporary reputation. Indeed, if Robert Treat Paine, Jr.'s elegy composed shortly after Brown's death is to be believed, Brown was better known as a poet than as a novelist.

The son of a well-known clockmaker, Gawen Brown, and his third wife, Elizabeth Hill Adams Brown, William Hill Brown was born in Boston late in the year 1765. One of his older half brothers, Mather Brown, the son of Gawen Brown and his second wife (a daughter of the Reverend Mather Byles), became a well-known artist. William Hill Brown, who was always in frail health, was encouraged in his literary ambitions by Catherine Byles, one of Mather Brown's mother's unmarried half sisters, who looked on all the...