Generally regarded as the first American novelist, Brown is a key figure in the tradition of Gothic fiction, for some of his novels--Edgar Huntly, Wieland, Arthur Mervyn--are responsible for "Americanizing" the Gothic, which in its European incarnation featured imagery (ruined castles, etc) that was simply non-existent, and hence symbolically inert, in America. Brown shifted the settings of his works to American locales--forests, towns, caves, outlying estates -- and relocated the sources of terror, yet retained a Gothic mood of emotional and psychological extremity.
