Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 Gothic novel set in rural Pennsylvania in 1787 by the American author Charles Brockden Brown.

It is considered an example of early American gothic literature, with themes such as wilderness anxiety, the supernatural, darkness, and irrational thought and fear.

Set in 1787, Edgar Huntly, a young man who lives with his uncle and sisters (his only remaining family) on a farm outside Philadelphia, is determined to learn who murdered his friend Waldegrave.

Walking near the elm tree under which Waldegrave was killed late one night, Huntly sees Clithero, a servant from a neighboring farm, half-dressed, digging in the ground and weeping loudly.

Instead he tells a complicated story about his life in Ireland, where he believes he was responsible for the death of a woman who was his patron, after which he fled to Pennsylvania.

One night, soon after Huntly goes to sleep in his own bed, he wakes up in a completely dark place made of rock, which he eventually determines is a cave.

According to Scott Bradfield, "Brown's notion of truth is so deeply private, so radically democratic, it never firmly or fully establishes itself anywhere or in any one person.

All people stand equal in their judgment of the truth, because no permanent, instantly accessible field of knowledge exists to which they can submit.

In the last half of the novel when he is called upon to kill Indians, he says that "My aversion to bloodshed was not to be subdued but by the direst necessity.

"[2] Those dire circumstances occur, and soon Huntly has killed three Indians, to which he remarks, "Three beings, full of energy and heroism, endowed with minds strenuous and lofty, poured out their lives before me.

"[2] Huntly mourns the fact that he had to take human life, however, later in the book he learns that one of the Indians he had slain might have been responsible for killing Waldegrave, and this knowledge comforts his conscience.

Another time Huntly manages to somehow escape being shot at repeatedly by jumping into a nearby river.

Edgar Huntly's Gothic devices nevertheless had an important influence on John Neal,[3] who considered Brown his literary father.