author
Mary White Rowlandson
d. 1711
Best known for one of early America’s most widely read captivity narratives, this colonial writer turned personal trauma into a book that shaped how generations imagined frontier life. Her account is still read for what it reveals about Puritan belief, war, survival, and the making of American literature.
2 Audiobooks
Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
by Mary White Rowlandson
Captives among the Indians : first-hand narratives of Indian wars, customs, tortures, and habits of life in colonial times
by Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Massy Harbison, Mary White Rowlandson, James Smith
About the author
Born Mary White in Somerset, England, around 1637, she came to New England as a child and later married the minister Joseph Rowlandson in Lancaster, Massachusetts. During King Philip’s War in 1676, she was captured in an attack on Lancaster and spent about eleven weeks in captivity before being ransomed.
Years later, she wrote about that experience in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (also published as A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson), a work that became one of the best-known texts of colonial New England. The book blends vivid personal testimony with Puritan religious reflection, and it remains important both as a historical document and as an early American literary classic.
Rowlandson later remarried and is generally identified as having died on January 5, 1711, in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Today she is remembered as a key early American author whose writing preserves a deeply personal view of conflict, faith, and endurance in the seventeenth century.