His father Elijah Brown, originally from Chester County, Pennsylvania, just southwest of Philadelphia, had a variable career primarily as a land-conveyancer or real estate agent.

During most of the 1790s, Brown developed his literary ambitions in projects that often remained incomplete (for example the so-called "Henrietta Letters," transcribed in the Clark biography) and frequently used his correspondence with friends as a laboratory for narrative experiments.

These novels and the rest of Brown's career were informed by the progressive ideas he used and developed from the period's British radical-democratic writers, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage.

Most notably, they develop the British radical-democratic models of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Holcroft and combine these with elements of German "Schauerromantik" Gothic from Friedrich Schiller, the enlightened sentimental fictions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Laurence Sterne, women's domestic novels by writers such as Fanny Burney or Hannah Webster Foster, and other genres such as the captivity narrative.

Brown builds plots around particular motifs such as sleepwalking and religious mania, drawing on Enlightenment-era medical writings by people such as Erasmus Darwin.

Of the seven novels extant, the first four to be published in book form (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) have received the lion's share of commentary and attention.

Stephen Calvert, which appeared only in serialized form and in the posthumous 1815 biography, remained little-read until the end of the 20th century, but is notable as the first U.S. novel to thematize same-sex sexuality.

Recent scholarship (since the 1980s), however, has largely revised this view and emphasizes the continuities and overall coherence of all seven novels understood as a loosely unified ensemble.

These late experimental narratives show Brown exploring the interface of fiction and history at the end of the Revolutionary era, at a moment that both follows the great Enlightenment historians (e.g., David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon) and prefigures the emergence of the 19th-century historical romance form in writers like Walter Scott or James Fenimore Cooper.

[citation needed] In addition to these pamphlets, magazines, and historical narratives, it is notable that Brown maintained his contacts with reformist and progressive individuals and institutions in 19th-century Philadelphia.

Although it was never completed, Brown planned from 1803 to 1806, with close friend Thomas Pym Cope, to publish a "History of Slavery" using the records of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Brown was regarded as a somewhat secondary novelist by scholars in the Cold War era who focused on normative aesthetic criteria and tended to ignore the wide scope of his writings, and their referential impact, but more recent and historically oriented scholarship has established Brown as a leading writer and intellectual of the late Enlightenment and early Republic.

In 2009, The Library of America selected Brown's short story "Somnambulism: A Fragment" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.

[10] The Library also included Brown's poem, "Monody, On the death of Gen. George Washington", in its volume of American poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.