Cotton Mather (1663-1728)
 Born in Massachusetts, Cotton Mather as a very intelligent child.  He attended Harvard at the age of 12, the youngest student ever admitted, and received his M.I. at the age of 18.  After school he assisted his father (Increase Mather) at the Second Church in Boston, and he was the co-minister until 1723.
 His first written document was the Declaration of the Gentlemen, Merchants, and Inhabitants of Boston (1689), which was a written manifesto against Andros.  He became very interested in the Salem Witch Craft Trials, and affirmed the justice of all the verdicts.  He continued on the write semi-scientific essays about the Trials: Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689) and Wonders of the Invisible World (1689) which was a narrative on some of the Salem Trials.
 In 1714 Mather was elected to the Royal Society of England, and began to view himself as the political and spiritual leader of Massachusetts. Yet he was known for his aggressiveness in controversy, arrogant manner, and his strict conservatism.
 His total of more than 450 works include histories, biographies, essays, sermons, fables, verses, theological treatises, philosophy, science, medicine, and practical piety. Mather believed that a work should be replete with allusions and quotations, and that richness of content was more important than the elegance of expression.
 He died in 1728.

John Winthrop

"If ye should find yerself drawn towards the sea,
Take the moral compass of poetry."

- Winthrop, John 

John Winthrop was born in Suffolk, England in 1587. He was his parents' only son. His father, Adam Winthrop, was the lord of Groton Manor, a small estate in the English countryside. In his childhood he as educated by a private tutor, and at the age of fourteen his father enrolled him in Trinity College in Cambridge. He studied there for two years and then returned to Groton to begin practical training in running his father's estate. His father introduced him to Mary Worth. Three weeks later John was married at the age of seventeen. Ten months later he became a father. John and his wife Mary had six children in ten years. Then Mary suddenly died. After six months John remarried, but on his first wedding anniversary his second wife died. One year later John married his third wife, Margaret. John Winthrop treasured her as his greatest possession. In his early thirties John began to study law. This would equip him with the legal expertise he needed to handle landlord-tenant disputes, collect rents, and deal with government authorities. In due time, John would follow in his father's footsteps as the next lord of Groton Manor. Next John became very interested in Puritanism.
In 1629, John Winthrop heard about a new venture called the Massachusetts Bay Company. The company would send workers to the New World to obtain furs, spices, and other exotic goods and ship them back to England for a profit. Most of the members of the Massachusetts Bay Company were Puritan. They had the full legal authority to move to New England and build an independent society where they could govern themselves according to the dictates of their conscience. When members of the Massachusetts Bay Company realized what a remarkable opportunity had come, they seized it and decided to go to the New World. They needed one man who could lead them to the New World and govern them once they arrived. John Winthrop was recognized by all as a man of ability, maturity, and faith, and the Company elected him as its governor. John Winthrop sold all his possessions and arranged to move his whole family from comfortable England to the wild and unknown New World.
John's wife Margaret was expecting a baby, so he decided to leave her and his oldest son at home for the first year while he went with the first group of settlers. On April 7, 1630, four ships with four hundred people set out from England across the stormy Atlantic. On board the ship, John Winthrop began to keep a diary. The contents of the diary are astounding. From the ship, Winthrop laid out the Puritan vision for the New World. America was to become a city on a hill. They arrived in Salem Massachusetts, the wilderness was overwhelming. Over the next ten years, twenty thousand settlers poured into Massachusetts. He required that they treat the Indians with dignity and respect, so that they might be won over to Christ. The very existence of Massachusetts was due to the courage, faith, and sacrifice of their governor.

William Bradford
William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned several languages. His participation in the migration to Holland and the Mayflower voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as governor, made him ideally suited to be the first historian of his colony. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the colony's beginning. Bradford also recorded the first document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the Mayflower Compact, drawn up while the Pilgrims were still on board ship. The compact was a harbinger of the Declaration of Independence to come a century and a half later. 

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
 Jefferson was the 3rd President of the United States (1801-1809), and was constantly involved in political service until the retirement his presidency.  He identified himself as an anti-British and made a large contribution to the Revolutionary War effort in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), a composition that stated that the Parliament had no authority in the colonies, only an alliance with the king.
 He was a member of the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1776 and is almost wholly responsible for the writing of the Declaration of Independence, which would be later looked on as his great monument in literature and political theory.  When holding his positions in the Virginia House of Burgesses (1776-1779) he attempted every means possible of making that document into a reality; all of which concerned education, religious freedom, economic equality, and other humanitarian reforms.
 Jefferson went on to write numerous essays and reports which would later have such an influence on the country, that several forms of government in western territories and the whole nation were based on. After serving as Minister to France, he returned to the U.S. to become the Secretary of State, and proposed a Bill of Rights, fearing that individual rights would be violated.  His greatest accomplishments in office were drafting the Kentucky resolutions (1798), Virginia resolutions, authorized the Louisiana Purchase, commissioned the expedition of Lewis and Clark, and was responsible for the Nonimportation Act and the Embargo Acts.
 After the presidency, he became primarily interested in the development of the University of Virginia, where he planned for a higher, more broad form of education.
 He died July 4, 1826 in Monticello.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
 Paine was born in England in 1737.  As well as an author, Paine held several occupations as a schoolteacher, tobacconist, grocer, and exciseman. He moved to Philadelphia in 1774. Once in America, Paine became to write for the Pennsylvania Magazine, and had his first, and most acclaimed, novel published by 1776.  The Common Sense urged for an immediate Declaration of Independence from Britain at a time in which others were calling only for reform. It was this work that brought Paine into public eye. During the Revolutionary War, he served as a soldier in the Continental Army; and he was appointed clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly.
 He left the United States to go to England in hopes of helping with the invention of the iron bridge. While in England he wrote The Rights of Man (1791-1792) which urged the English to create a new republic during the time of the French Revolution. He was sentence to banishment for crime of treason, and fled to France.  In France he was made a citizen by the French Assembly.  But he allied himself with the moderate republicans, had his citizenship revoked and went to prison. While in prison, he wrote The Age of Reason (1794-1795), which would be known as his greatest deistic work.
 He returned to America in 1802 where he continued to play a large part in politics.  During his last years, Paine suffered poverty, ill health, and ostracism; and continually was accused of drunkenness, cowardice, adultery, and atheism.  He dies in 1809, and was buried on his New Pochelle farm when consecrated ground was refused to him.

James Fenimore Cooper 
Was the first great professional American author. He was born on September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey. He grew up in a frontier village, here, in the wilderness he was to immortalize in his frontier novels. He was expelled from Yale, because of a prank. He then signed into the Navy. In 1820 he wrote Precaution, which was followed by The Spy in 1821. These were just the beginning of his works. Cooper created two unique genres: sea romance, and the frontier adventure story. This detailed portrayal of frontier life can be found in, the first truly American novel, The Last of the Mohicans(1826).

Walt Whitman: was born on Long Island in 1819. He left home at age 13 and worked in New York City doing random newspaper jobs. He was an ardent Jacksonian and later a free soiler, which got Whitman in a lot of trouble with his publishers. He was definitely o common man, but not an ordinary man. While trying his hand at writing he worked as a carpenter and regularly carried the writings of the leading transcendentalists of his time. His most well known book Leaves of Grass, is a collection of poetry that he wrote during this time. He broke all the previous rules of poetry, writing free verse and undisciplined poetry. He also liked to use foreign phrases and made up words and used the American dialect well. Whitman’s work was the most romantic and by far the most American of his age. Whitman died in 1892, not entirely understood, for his works tended to offend people, but he was at least appreciated.

Sojourner Truth: was born slave in Ulster County, New York in 1797. She was born Isabella Baumfree, and was known as one of the most ardent abolitionists of the day. She became free in 1828 under a New York Law that banned slavery. She traveled the country to preach her message of freedom to others. She also wrote many influential pieces of literature having to do with her cause, the abolition of slavery. During and after the Civil War, Truth worked in Washington D.C to improve living conditions there. She helped find jobs and homes for slaves who had escaped the South. She also tried to convince Lincoln to set aside the undeveloped lands in the West as farms for blacks, however it received little government support. Sojourner Truth died in 1883, known to many as one of the most outspoken abolitionists of her time.

Henry David Thoreau-The Man, the Writer, and the Thinker Born in 1817, Thoreau graduated from Harvard with Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837, a contemporary and fellow transcendentalist. Even at that point his strong distaste for conformity was already evident; at graduation, when required to wear a black coat, he instead wore a green one. For a while, he was a school teacher and contributor to some periodicals; he also ran a pencil-manufacturing business for his family for a time. In 1845, in accordance with certain philosophies which he had developed, he moved to Walden Pond and built a 10-by-15-foot cabin, isolating himself for a short period except for the occasional visitor. In 1846, he refused to pay his poll tax based on his opposition to the Mexican War and slavery, feelings shared by many of his transcendentalist colleagues. He spent a night in jail, but an aunt paid the tax for him on her own initiative; he never requested that anyone do so. This experience was the genesis of his essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” which explained his belief that “that government is best which governs not at all,” and that peaceful civil disobedience is an appropriate response to certain situations. He disliked what he thought were the materialistic values of society and above all detested conformity. In 1847, he left Walden to try something new. Walden was published in 1854, and his other book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was published in 1849. Both sold poorly in his own time period, though many of Thoreau’s ideas became widely accepted during the 1960’s. He died in 1862.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1806-1864)

Novelist and short-story writer, born in Salem, MA. Educated at Bowdon College, he shut himself away for 12 years to learn to write fiction. He privately published his first novel, "Fanshawe", in 1828, and was disappointed by its failure; but later some of the stories gained favorable notice from the London Athenaeum , and a volume of them, Twice-Told Tales , was published in 1837.
Hawthorne was heavily influenced by his Puritan heritage. Other personal influences reflected in Hawthorne’s writing include his love of reading, nature and the writings of  Shakespeare. His first major success was the novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), still the best known of his works. For several years, which he later referred to as the happiest period of his life, Hawthorne spent all his time roaming the forest, hunting and fishing. The freedom he felt in nature is often represented in The Scarlet Letter.  Other books include The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Snow Image (1852), and a campaign biography of his old school friend, President Franklin Pierce, on whose inauguration Hawthorne became consul at Liverpool (1853-7). Only belatedly recognized in his own country, he continued to write articles and stories, notably those for the Atlantic Monthly, collected as Our Old Home.
Hawthorne was hailed as an insightful writer, who was able to craft novels revolving around such sensitive topics as adultery because of his established reputation as an important author of his time. Some other important themes that Hawthorne was able to write about were: alienation, initiation, problem of guilt, pride, Puritan New England, Italian background, allegory, individual vs. society, self-fulfillment vs. accommodation or frustration, hypocrisy vs. integrity, love vs. hate, exploitation vs. hurting, and fate vs. free will.  However, Hawthorne’s literary style was so highly stylized and romanticized that he sometimes received the same brand of criticism.
He died in 1864.
 

Edgar Allan Poe: was born in Boston in 1809. His parents were poor actors, whom died before he was three years old. He was raised by a wealthy Virginian, John Allan. He won an appointment to West Point but was discharged a few months later for disobedience. He was a lifelong alcoholic and occasional taker of drugs. He married his own 13 year old cousin. He once tried to poison himself and constantly starved himself.  Poe became famous through his short stories and poetry; a caricature of the Romanticism and a tortured genius. His writing exemplified the popular movement of romanticism, but with a gothic twist. Poe was the first American writer to ever attempt to write this type of literature, but became famous for doing so. He perfected the detective story and was one of the first writers of science fiction (The Pit and the Pendulum, The Cask of Amontillado) and horror (Tell Tale Heart, The Raven). He did not represent the values prized by the middle class Americans of his time, however despite this he was widely read during his own time. He died at the age of 40, his cause of death, unknown. 

Henry James: was born into a wealthy and prominent New York family in 1843. James never married, considering it a burden to his literary career. Henry James, despite being an American, did most of his writing in Europe. He was a realist that rejected the previous generation’s sense of romanticism. his writing was widely acclaimed by his peers, but he did not gain popularity beyond that in America. The major themes in his books consisted between the clash of European and American cultures at the time. He often wrote about the corruptness of the wealthy and addressed the social issue of feminism. His most famous works, The American, Wings of the Dove, and Portrait of a Lady are centered around these major themes. James died in 1916.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)
 Alcott was born in Pennsylvania, and wrote her first collection of writings at the age of 16 (Flower Fables, 1854). She grew up being friends with such literary greats as Thoreau, Emerson, and Theodore Parker, and was surrounded by creative genius all her life.  At first she wanted to be an actress, so she began to write several unproduced melodramas, poems and short stories, some of which were published in the Atlantic Monthly.
 She served in the Civil War as a nurse in a Union hospital, during which she composed a series of letters, Hospital Sketches (1863).  By 1865 Alcott had written her first novel, Moods.  In that same year Alcott had the opportunity to travel Europe as a lady’s companion, and soon after Alcott would produce her most acclaimed novel Little Women (1868-69).  This novel was a cheerful account of her own early life experiences in New England, herself being Jo.  It was at this time in her life that she became a feminist.
 She died in 1888.