Though suicide in American literature seems to belong to the twentieth century, core patterns of suicide had already emerged in the nineteenth-century novel. Five suicide themes are analyzed in selected novels from 1798 to 1909, with chapter paradigms drawing on an array of historical, cultural, and social-scientific sources and medical theories from 1792 to the present. Chapter one argues that Charles Brockden Brown's dramatization of the murder-suicide sequence in Wieland (1798), filtered through semi-fictional experimentation on suicide and scientific readings in Erasmus Darwin, maps the new nation's violence, and prefigures contemporary theory about suicidal pathology. Chapter two identifies Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (1852) as a >suicide-survivor novel< or >Uberlebendenroman.< Erich FROMM's insights about self-destruction and characterological necrophilia, and contemporary theory about suicide survivorship, structure my analysis of how suicide unsettles mode as the arhythmical journey of the survivor's healing and philosophical investigations are traced. Chapter three explores >symbolic-age crisis,< the modern term underscoring what Dr. Henry Morselli perceived in the 1890s: suicides often occur during failed developmental transitions. Such struggles in Rebecca Harding Davis's >Life in the Iron Mills< (1861), Stephen Crane's Maggie (1893), and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) parallel the post-Civil War growing pains of our country as social observers such as Jacob Riis and Henry and William James voiced fears about the >epidemic< of suicide. Chapter four probes the choice of a suicide method vis-a-vis its lethality in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), which follows the author's excursion into problems of self-determination in the bedrugged upper echelons of society. Modern suicidologist Edwin S. Shneidman's rubrics of classification explain Lily Bart's gradual and ambivalent self-poisoning as a >subintentioned< suicide; nineteenth-century pharmacology on chloral hydrate (in the work of Drs. David H. Tuke and George Miller Beard, among others) provides historical context. Chapter five is also grounded in nineteenth-century cultural perspectives about suicide, evaluating gender-specific features in the suicide deaths of male and female artists in Henry James's Princess Casamassima (1886), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and Jack London's Martin Eden (1909).