Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker

"Edgar Huntly starts with a doubled mystery," says Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, professor emerita of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. "The body of a young frontiersman has been found murdered on the edge of his farm in Western Pennsylvania. A poor Irish émigré is found sleepwalking, and, in that state, weeping and frantically digging in the ground near where the young man was found." Other scenes occur north of Philadelphia in a cave near the Forks of the Delaware River, either in Eastern Pennsylvania or the Catskill Mountains of New York. The protagonist also makes reference to his uncle, a military veteran of Braddock's Defeat on the Monongahela River.

1787