What was the ‘first American novel’? On this Independence Day, a look at what it started

NEW YORK — In the winter of 1789, around the time that George Washington was elected the nation’s first president, a Boston printer quietly founded another American institution.

William Hill Brown’s “The Power of Sympathy”, published anonymously by Isaiah Thomas & Company is often cited as something memorable: the first American novel.

Brown’s story, which runs to about 100 pages, tells of two young New Englanders whose love affair ends abruptly and tragically when they discover a shocking secret that makes their relationship unbearable. The dedication page, addressed to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia” (the United States), promised an exposé of “the fatal consequences of seduction” and a prescription for the “Economy of Human Life.”

Outside of Boston society, however, few would have known or cared whether “The Power of Sympathy” would mark a literary milestone.

“If you picked 10 random citizens, I doubt they would have cared,” says David Lawrimore, an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho who has written extensively about early American literature. “Most people weren’t thinking about the first American novel.”

Brown’s book, subtitled “The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth,” is in many ways typical of its time, whether in its epistolary format, its anglicized prose, its unknown author, or its pious message. But “The Power of Sympathy” also contains themes that reflected the aspirations and fears of a young nation and that still resonate today.

Dana McClain, assistant professor of English at Holy Family University, notes that Brown was an outspoken federalist who believed in a strong national government and shared his contemporaries’ preoccupation with forging a stable republican citizenry. The letters in “The Power of Sympathy” include reflections on class, temperament, and the differences between North and South, particularly the “aristocratic temperament” of southern slaveholders that threatened “domestic tranquility” as if predicting the Civil War of the next century.

Like many other early American writers, fiction and nonfiction, Brown connected women’s behavior to the fate of the larger society. The novel’s correspondents worry about the destabilizing “power of pleasure” and how female envy “is sweeping the land with a flood of scandal.” Virtue is likened to a “mighty river” that “fertilizes the land through which it flows, increasing in size and strength until it empties itself into the ocean.”

Brown also explores at length how novels can be a path to corruption or a means to upliftment, which ties into current debates about banning and restricting books in schools and libraries.

“Most of the novels with which our female libraries are abound, are built upon a foundation not always based on strict morality, and upon the pursuit of objects not always probable or praiseworthy,” warns one of Brown’s characters. “Novels, which are not regulated upon the chaste principles of true friendship, rational love, and marital duty, appear to me to be utterly unfit to form the minds of women, of friends, or of wives.”

Brown was probably more interested in shaping minds than in literary glory. “The Great American Novel” is a favorite catchphrase, but it was not coined until the 1860s. During Brown’s lifetime, novels were a relatively crude art form, valued primarily for satire, light entertainment, or moral instruction. Few writers identified themselves as “novelists”: Brown was known as a poet, an essayist, and an opera composer.

Even he acknowledged the book’s inferior status, writing in the novel’s preface: “This kind of writing has not been received with general approval.”

“The Power of Sympathy” was often cited in the 19th century as the first American novel, but few bothered to debate it until the 20th century. Scholars then agreed that honors should be given to the first written and published in the United States by an author born and living in the country.

Those guidelines disqualified such earlier works as Charlotte Ramsay Lennox’s “The Life of Harriot Stuart” and Thomas Atwood Digges’ “Adventures of Alonso.” Another contender was “Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca,” a prose adventure by students Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, both of whom had prominent public careers. The manuscript was written around 1770 but was later considered lost and not published in full until 1975.

Brown’s novel went so unnoticed for so long that the public did not discover he had written it until the late 19th century. Many had praised the Boston poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, whose family had endured a scandal similar to that in “The Power of Sympathy.”

In 1894–95, Bostonian editor Arthur W. Brayley published the novel in his magazine, identifying Morton as the author. But after being approached by Brown’s niece, Rebecca Vollentine Thompson, Brayley published a lengthy correction, titled “The Real Author of the ‘Power of Sympathy.’”

Thompson herself added a preface to a 1900 reissue, noting that Brown had close ties to Morton’s family and claiming that the publication had been “suppressed” because Brown had exposed an “unfortunate scandal.”

Brown, the son of a clockmaker, was originally from Boston, probably born in 1765. He was well-read, well-connected, culturally conservative, and politically minded; one of his first published writings was an unflattering poem about Daniel Shays, the namesake of the 1786–87 rebellion of impoverished Revolutionary War veterans in Massachusetts. Brown was also the author of several posthumous works, including the play “The Treason of Arnold” and the novel “Ira and Isabella.”

Its unofficial status as “America’s First Novelist” did not lead to wider recognition. The novel, currently in print in a 1996 edition from Penguin Classics, remains of more interest to specialists and antiquarians than to general readers.

Brown was not yet 30 when he died in North Carolina in 1793 of what was probably malaria. He apparently never married or had children. There are no memorials or other historical sites dedicated to him. No literary societies have been founded in his name.

His burial place is unknown.