The Puritans in America

A Narrative Anthology

Edited by Alan Heimert

Edited by Andrew Delbanco

    By presenting Puritan sermons, reminiscences, poetry, and other writings in a chronological fashion, Heimert and Delbanco have captured the spirit of a vibrant New England, experiencing social, religious, and economic change. The editors' brief introductions to many of the selections make this volume especially attractive to students of Puritan history and literature.
       --Virginia Quarterly Review

    What commends this particular book are its chronological organization, its insistence that any firm generalizations about Puritans may obscure the 'human uncertainty' of their lives in America, its treatment of the movement as sensibility rather than ideology, and its focus on emotionality in the context of the past. By defining Puritanism as an affective style and them allowing us to trace that style's literary effusions over a century, Heimert and Delbanco invite us to investigate how communities organize their emotions and how time transfigures culturally prescribed feeling, a task well worth taking up. If the heart has its reason, it has its history too.
       --Charles L. Cohen, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

    This anthology pays tribute to Puritan trailblazers in political, religious and literary realms and casts them in a new and sparkling light. Lucid editorial notes and passages accompany the individual selections, the tone of which are at once friendly and scholarly.
       --Susan Monsky, Boston Sunday Globe

  • Cover: The Puritans in America

Alan Heimert is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University.

Andrew Delbanco is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Among his many publications are The Puritan Ordeal and The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (both from Harvard).