Edgar Huntly : or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker

Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, written in 1799, is the most ambitious work by America's first important novelist.

Not only a complex and challenging novel in its own right, it distinctively foreshadows the concern with depth psychology in later American fiction from Poe to Faulkner, as well as the scientific discoveries of Freud himself.

Set in rural Pennsylvania, the story recounts the fate of young Edgar Huntly as he goes in search of the murderer of his fiancee's brother.

Once he believes he has discovered the killer sleepwalking at the scene of the crime, he pursues the man relentlessly, and then obsessively, until it becomes clear to Brown's readers that Huntly is driven by motives buried deep within his subconscious.

Though much of what occurs in Edgar Huntly may have escaped Brown's own understanding and intentions, he was certainly conscious of having presented a particularly American version of the classic gothic novel.