Hugh Henry Brackenridge

Writer and judge, born in Campbeltown, SWC Scotland, UK. He was brought to the USA at age five. He studied at Princeton, became a chaplain, and wrote two patriotic dramas during the American Revolution. He turned to the study and practice of law before settling in Pittsburgh. He later helped establish the first newspaper and bookstore in frontier Pittsburgh. A Pennsylvania assemblyman and Supreme Court justice, he is best known for Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), regarded as the first novel based in the American West and still a pertinent satire of the social and political conditions of the era.

Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) was an American writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. A frontier citizen of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he founded both the Pittsburgh Academy, now the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Gazette, still operating today as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

He was raised in York County, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border, then a frontier, where his parents had immigrated in 1753 from Scotland when he was 5. At age 19 he entered the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, where he joined Philip Morin Freneau, James Madison, and others in forming the American Whig Society to counter the conservative Cliosophic, or Tory, Society. (Today these are conjoined as the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.) 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 in Arabia . They also wrote The Rising Glory of America, a prophetic poem of a united nation that would rule the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

After his graduation, Brackenridge remained another year to study divinity. In 1772 he became headmaster of an academy in Somerset County, Maryland, with Freneau as his assistant;

In 1781 Pittsburgh was a village of 400 inhabitants, most Scots, like himself, Scots-Irish, and Germans.

In Pittsburgh he helped establish the first western newspaper, the Pittsburgh Gazette, in 1786; was elected in 1786 to the Pennsylvania state assembly, where he fought for the adoption of the federal Constitution; and obtained state endowments in 1787 for the establishment of the Pittsburgh Academy (University of Pittsburgh), modeled on Benjamin Franklin's Academy of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania). He also played a role in the little known Westsylvania dispute, siding with Pennsylvania that the western lands should not become a 14th state.

In 1815 he completed Modern Chivalry, his rambling satirical novel. 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.

The Allegheny County borough of Brackenridge, Pennsylvania is named for his son, the lawyer, judge, and writer Henry Marie Brackenridge (1786-1871). The Death of General Montgomery at the Siege of Quebec. A second patriotic drama for production at Maryland's Somerset Academy, where he was a master, is about the ill-fated attack on Quebec. Modern Chivalry. The first two parts of Brackenridge's satirical novel appear. 1814 Law Miscellanies. Essays concerning Pennsylvania law, federal statutes, judgments of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the employment of English common law in the American legal system.