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Which book is often considered the first American novel?
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American literature
Map of Virginia from John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, 1624.
The book widely considered to be the first American novel is The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth, written by William Hill Brown and published in 1789.123
An epistolary novel that explores themes of tragic, incestuous love, the work adopted the sentimental novel style popularized by the British author Samuel Richardson. By utilizing this established form, Brown helped overcome contemporary prejudices against the novel as a literary genre, paving the way for a subsequent surge of sentimental fiction in the United States.13