author
John Smith
1580–1631
An adventurer, soldier, and early American writer, this larger-than-life figure helped shape the story of Jamestown and then turned his experiences into some of the best-known accounts of early English America.
2 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in Lincolnshire and baptized in 1580, he lived a restless, dramatic life as a soldier and traveler before joining the Virginia Company expedition that founded Jamestown in 1607. He became one of the colony’s strongest leaders during its precarious early years and later wrote extensively about Virginia, New England, and his own adventures.
His books, including A Description of New England and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, helped create a lasting image of England’s first colonial ventures in North America. They also fixed his name in popular memory through stories connected with Pocahontas, though parts of his self-told life have long been debated by historians.
Even so, his writing remains important for the way it mixes firsthand observation, promotion, and storytelling. Read today, it offers a vivid window into the ambitions, dangers, and myths of the early seventeenth-century Atlantic world.