Brown deserves a place in the history of American literature for his four romances: _Wieland_, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, and _Edgar Huntly_. These were all published within the space of three years from 1798, the date of the publication of _Wieland_. These romances show a striking change from the American fiction which had preceded them. They are no longer didactic and sentimental, but Gothic or romantic. Working under English influence, Brown gave to America her first great Gothic romances. The English romance which influenced him the most was _Caleb Williams_ (1794), the work of William Godwin (1756-1836), the father-in-law of the poet Shelley. _Wieland_ is considered the strongest of Brown's Gothic romances, but it does not use as distinctively American materials as his three other stories of this type, _Ormond_, _Arthur Mervyn_, or _Memoirs of the Year 1793_, and _Edgar Huntly_. The results of his own experience with the yellow fever plague in Philadelphia give an American touch to _Ormond_ and _Arthur Mervyn_, and at the same time add the Gothic element of weirdness and horror. _Arthur Mervyn_ is far the better of the two. _Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker_, shows a Gothic characteristic in its very title. This book is noteworthy in the evolution of American fiction, not because of the strange actions of the sleep walker, but for the reason that Brown here deliberately determines, as he states in his prefatory note _To the Public_ to give the romance an American flavor, by using "the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the Western wilderness." If we assume that John Smith's story of Pocahontas is not fiction, then to Brown belongs the honor of first recognizing in the Indian a valuable literary asset from the Gothic romancer's point of view. In Chapter XVI., he reverses Captain Smith's story and has Edgar Huntly rescue a young girl from torture and kill an Indian. In the next two chapters, the hero kills four Indians. The English recognized this introduction of a new element of strangeness added to terror and gave Brown the credit of developing an "Americanized" Gothic. He disclosed to future writers of fiction, like James Fenimore Cooper (p. 125), a new mine of American materials. This romance has a second distinguishing characteristic, for Brown surpassed contemporary British novelists in taking his readers into the open air, which forms the stage setting for the adventures of _Edgar Huntly_. The hero of that story loves to observe the birds, the squirrels, and the old Indian woman "plucking the weeds from among her corn, bruising the grain between two stones, and setting her snares for rabbits and opossums." He takes us where we can feel the exhilaration from "a wild heath, whistled over by October blasts meagerly adorned with the dry stalks of scented shrubs and the bald heads of the sapless mullein."