In the winter of 1789, around the time George Washington was elected as the first United States president, a printer quietly published what would become the first American novel.
William Hill Brown wrote the book, called The Power of Sympathy. Isaiah Thomas & Company in Boston, Massachusetts published it anonymously.
Around 100 pages long, The Power of Sympathy is a love story of two young New Englanders. Their relationship ends suddenly and tragically when they learn of a shocking secret. The book is dedicated to the “Young Ladies of United Columbia” (the United States).
Outside of Boston, though, few Americans would have known or cared about The Power of Sympathy as a historical marker.
David Lawrimore, who teaches at the University of Idaho, has written about early U.S. literature. He said, “If you picked ten random citizens, I doubt it would have mattered to any of them.”
“Most people weren’t thinking about the first American novel,” he added.
What the first American novel was like
The Power of Sympathy is in many ways a sign of its time with its use of letters, religious messages and formal language. But the story also includes themes of the worries and hopes of a young country.
Dana McClain is an assistant professor of English at Holy Family University. McClain noted that Brown was an outspoken Federalist who believed in a strong national government and stable society.
The letters in The Power of Sympathy include the subjects of class, public outlook and the differences between North and South, as if expecting the Civil War that followed in the 1860s.
Like many other early American writers, Brown tied the behavior of women to the fate of the larger society. The novel’s letters concern the “power of pleasure” and how female envy could bring “a flood of scandal.” The book compares high moral standards to a “mighty river” that “fertilizes the country through which it passes….”
A character in the book warns, “Most of the novels with which our female libraries are overrun are built upon a foundation not always placed on strict morality and in the pursuit of objects not always probable or praiseworthy.” The character adds, “(they) appear to me totally unfit to form the minds of women, of friends, or of wives.”
How it became considered the first
The Power of Sympathy was commonly cited as the first American novel in the 1800s without much debate. Experts then agreed that the honor should belong to the first book written and published in the United States by a writer born and still living in the country.
These guidelines disqualified several earlier works such 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 which was written around 1770 but was not published until 1975.
Author Brown was likely born in 1765 in Boston. One of his early published works was a poem about Daniel Shays. Shays led a rebellion of former Revolutionary War soldiers in Massachusetts.
Brown was not yet 30 when he died in North Carolina, in 1793, from what experts believe was malaria. He never married or had children. After his death, publishers released his play The Treason of Arnold and another novel Ira and Isabella.
Brown did not gain much fame in his short life. No memorials, historical places, or literary societies have been named after Brown. Even the site of his burial place is a mystery.
I'm Caty Weaver.
