Born to intellectual Quaker parents in 1771 and trained as a lawyer, Brown was one of the most important literary innovators of his age. His mind was molded in that last moment of the late Enlightenment when the desire to master the arts and the natural sciences was one, and knowledge was freely disseminated. Not only was Brown the most ambitious American fiction writer of his day, but he was also a probing literary theorist and a keen political thinker whose interests ranged from Cicero to Rousseau and from women’s rights to U.S. foreign policy. He was a polymath, in the mode of Franklin and Jefferson, who edited magazines, authored political pamphlets, and engaged in many of the debates of his day. Long known among scholars as “America’s first professional novelist,” Brown is now undergoing a renaissance of interest in all his work, which offers a broad and incisive commentary on the culture and politics of the early United States.