Alcuin: A Dialogue

by Charles Brockden Brown

A fierce and elegant plea for the rights of women.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is bet know for his Gothic novels — Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly — but Alcuin was his first book. The first half appeared in 1798; the second half was published posthumously, in 1815. Until now the parts have never been reunited, making this edition of Alcuin, a reproduction of the limited edition by Leonard Baskin, something more than the first significant argument for women's rights published in this country: it is the first complete edition of the first published work of America's first professional writer.

103 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.