To early European visitors, America was a land of the fantastic. Their reports were full of strange people, weird foodstuffs, incredible riches. Such travellers' tales inevitably became the basis of literature about America which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was often written to advertise colonial ventures by people who had never been there. During the first 300 years of European settlement in America, settlers primarily saw themselves as British, French or Spanish rather than as American, and what literature there was, therefore, tended to continue such fanciful forms, or to follow European models, subject matter and sensibilities. By the time of American independence, however, journals featuring American poets, essayists and short story writers were being published in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Of the first generation of American novelists who used the Gothic mode around the time of the Revolution and in its immediate aftermath, the most significant was probably Charles Brockden Brown. Brown absorbed the Gothic sensibilities and radical perspectives of writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. His reading informed a series of startling, often violent novels which appeared over a very short period at the end of the century. The first published was Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), in which the title character is driven to madness and murder by a malevolent ventriloquist who makes Wieland believe he is hearing the voice of God. In Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), Huntly sets out to find a murderer but, after a mysterious episode of sleep walking, discovers that the real villains are American Indians who committed the crime to foment a war against the settlers.