_Wieland_ is considered the strongest of Brown's Gothic romances, but it
does not use as distinctively American materials as his three other stories
of this type, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, or _Memoirs of the Year 1793_, and
_Edgar Huntly_. The results of his own experience with the yellow fever
plague in Philadelphia give an American touch to _Ormond_ and _Arthur
Mervyn_, and at the same time add the Gothic element of weirdness and
horror. _Arthur Mervyn_ is far the better of the two.

_Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker_, shows a Gothic characteristic
in its very title. This book is noteworthy in the evolution of American
fiction, not because of the strange actions of the sleep walker, but for
the reason that Brown here deliberately determines, as he states in his
prefatory note _To the Public_ to give the romance an American flavor, by
using "the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the Western
wilderness." If we assume that John Smith's story of Pocahontas is not
fiction, then to Brown belongs the honor of first recognizing in the Indian
a valuable literary asset from the Gothic romancer's point of view. In
Chapter XVI., he reverses Captain Smith's story and has Edgar Huntly rescue
a young girl from torture and kill an Indian. In the next two chapters, the
hero kills four Indians. The English recognized this introduction of a new
element of strangeness added to terror and gave Brown the credit of
developing an "Americanized" Gothic. He disclosed to future writers of
fiction, like James Fenimore Cooper (p. 125), a new mine of American
materials. This romance has a second distinguishing characteristic, for
Brown surpassed contemporary British novelists in taking his readers into
the open air, which forms the stage setting for the adventures of _Edgar
Huntly_. The hero of that story loves to observe the birds, the squirrels,
and the old Indian woman "plucking the weeds from among her corn, bruising
the grain between two stones, and setting her snares for rabbits and
opossums." He takes us where we can feel the exhilaration from "a wild