Barnes & Noble Digital Library

Waldegrave is dead.  Murdered.  His assassin is unknown.  His friend, a young man named Edgar Huntly, desperately searches for clues to the identity of the assailant, to no avail.  Then one night, Edgar discovers a strange man digging a hole underneath the same elm tree where the slain Waldegrave was discovered.  A moment later, the stranger turns from the elm and walks deep into the tangled woods of Norwalk.  Thus begins America’s first great murder mystery.  Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) is a dark tale of frontier violence, murder, revenge, and the deep psychological obsessions that break down human rationality.  Written in the tradition of the late eighteenth-century European gothic romance, but adapted by Brown to American themes and subjects, Edgar Huntly is the crowning achievement of one of America’s first great novelists.