Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1770

by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Philip Freneau

This book was written in 1770, and might thus plausibly claim the distinction of being the first American novel. It is an early work of two men who later came to rank among the most important literary figures of the American Revolution and early Republic. Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) was a distinguished Pennsylvania jurist and politician. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the author of anti-British satires during the Revolution, and an anti-Federalist editor working for Jefferson in the early 1790s. This is a humorous work which contrasts East and West, Bombo's exotic mission and the mundane world in which he travels. It was actually written to mock members of the Cliosophic Society at Princeton Univ. and the tradition of oriental romance. Illus.

Genres: American

97 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1975

About the author

Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748 – June 25, 1816) was an American writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

A frontier citizen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, he founded both the Pittsburgh Academy, now the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Gazette, still operating today as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Brackenridge was born in Kintyre, Scotland, a village near Campbeltown. In 1753, when he was 5, his family emigrated to York County, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, then a frontier.[1][2] At age 15 he was head of a free school in Maryland. At age 19 he entered the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, where he joined Philip Morin Freneau, James Madison, and others in forming the American Whig Society to counter the conservative Cliosophic, or Tory, Society. (Today these are conjoined as the American Whig–Cliosophic Society.) Freneau and Brackenridge collaborated on a satire on American manners that may be the first work of prose fiction written in America, Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca .[3] They also wrote The Rising Glory of America, a prophetic poem of a united nation that would rule the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Brackenridge recited it at the commencement exercises of 1771.

He corresponded with other politically active men such as Alexander Addison, a major figure in the Whiskey Rebellion.[5][6][7] In 1815 he completed Modern Chivalry, his rambling satirical novel. Widely considered the first important fictional work about the American frontier and called "to the West what Don Quixote was to Europe," the third and fourth sections of the book appeared in 1793 and 1797, and a revision in 1805, with a final addition in 1815. Henry Adams called it "a more thoroughly American book than any written before 1833."

Brackenridge died June 25, 1816 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The Allegheny County borough of Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, is named for his son, the lawyer, judge, and writer Henry Marie Brackenridge (1786–1871).