William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature was published 226 years ago today, in 1789. It’s generally considered the first American novel.
"The Power of Sympathy is a sentimental novel in the strictest sense of the term: a kind of humanistic endeavor to evoke emotions in readers, giving them models on which to base their own emotional lives. It was crucial, in the second half of the eighteenth century, to allow yourself to be whipped into an emotional lather—showing your feelings was a mark of character."
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