Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748 – June 25, 1816) was an American writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Freneau and Brackenridge collaborated on a satire on American manners that may be the first work of prose fiction written in America, Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca .

He went back to Princeton for a Master's degree, and then served in George Washington's army as a chaplain, preaching fiery patriotic sermons to the soldiers of the American Revolutionary War.

He started the United States Magazine in Philadelphia in 1778, where he published poems by his friend Freneau, but its lagging subscriptions convinced him to change his profession.

Another legislator at the party, William Findley, published an account of the remarks, and the subsequent controversy led to Brackenridge's electoral defeat.

Widely considered the first important fictional work about the American frontier and called "to the West what Don Quixote was to Europe," the third and fourth sections of the book appeared in 1793 and 1797, and a revision in 1805, with a final addition in 1815.

Brackenridge died June 25, 1816, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he is buried in the Old Graveyard along with John Bannister Gibson, who succeeded him on the state supreme court.