The first American novelist to make a significant splash on the world stage was Charles Brockden Brown. Born in 1771 in Philadelphia, his parents wanted him to be a lawyer, but he found he had no taste for it and spent time instead trying to build a career out of writing. His early worked did not sell particularly well, but Brown's extensive narrative experimentation caught the interest of other authors, so that his novels were the first American novels to be translated into various European languages. He was especially influential on English Romantics -- he was a favorite of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, and was widely recommended by some of the great literary names of the day.
His novel, Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, was published in 1798. It has sometimes been criticized as a gimmick novel -- spontaneous combustion and ventriloquism (which Brown often calls by the older name 'biloquism', to get the play on words of 'double tongue') both play a significant role. The story of uncanny happenings and murder is often read as a criticism of naive and over-idealized views of democracy, as it focuses on the features of real life that disrupt democratic life: lies, illusions, misrepresentations, superstitions, secrets, religious fanaticisms, utopian zealotries, intellectual obsessions, use of scientific knowledge to manipulate people.
The version I have also has Brown's sequel-fragment, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, so I will be reading that as well.
