Sheppard Lee

This 1834 novel written by a physician/writer from Philadelphia holds its own with anything Poe or Melville ever wrote in terms of weirdness, psychological complexity, and sheer literary panache. 

It tells the story of a singularly unambitious young man who accidentally kills himself and then discovers that he has the power to reanimate the corpses of others who have just died. And so our hero finds himself living the lives of a rich man with terrible gout, a playboy, a misguided Quaker philanthropist, and – most shockingly – a rebel slave. 

Through it all, Sheppard Lee still maintains a sense… show more.

Robert Montgomery Bird was a Renaissance man and author, working as a doctor, novelist, playwright, and farmer, and writing across multiple genres. His most experimental and worthwhile novel is Sheppard Lee, a piece of proto-science fiction in which the spirit of a recently deceased loafer travels through the bodies of a merchant, a dandy, a moneylender, a Quaker, an enslaved man, and an aristocrat. Bird’s novel satirizes social mobility in the early nation, articulates contemporary medical philosophy on mind/body dualism, and reveals anxieties that young white men may lose their place in society.