Brown’s Early Biographers and Reception, 1815–1940s

Abstract

The biography of Charles Brockden Brown continued to be of literary and scholarly interest after his death in 1810 and into the twentieth century. William Dunlap, one of Brown’s closest friends, extended an earlier aborted attempt at a biography of Brown and published his two-volume Life of Charles Brockden Brown in 1815. Dunlap provided the biographical basis for numerous essays and sketches that periodically remembered Brown’s life and work and sustained public interest in the author. Few new details of Brown’s biography surfaced over the years, so these recurrences of brief literary biographies serve as an evolving record of Brown’s literary reception across changes in public and artistic tastes. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Daniel Edwards Kennedy compiled a six-hundred-thousand-word biography of Brown but left it, at his death in 1960, incomplete and unpublished. Subsequent scholars, however, have benefited from additional biographical details that Kennedy’s researches uncovered.