author
Michael Wigglesworth
1631–1705
Best known for the wildly popular Puritan poem The Day of Doom, this early New England writer was also a minister and physician. His work offers a vivid glimpse into colonial religious life, where poetry, preaching, and personal faith were closely tied together.
2 Audiobooks
The Day of Doom; Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement
by Michael Wigglesworth
The Day of Doom; Or, A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment With Other Poems
by Michael Wigglesworth
About the author
Born in England in 1631, he came to New England as a child when his family emigrated in 1638. He later studied at Harvard, became a fellow and tutor there, and went on to serve for many years as minister in Malden, Massachusetts.
Alongside his ministry, he practiced medicine and wrote poetry shaped by Puritan belief. His most famous work, The Day of Doom (1662), a long poem about the Last Judgment, became one of the best-known and most widely read books in early New England.
He also kept a diary and wrote other religious verse, leaving behind a record that helps modern readers understand the spiritual anxieties and daily life of seventeenth-century colonial America. He died in 1705, remembered as a preacher, physician, and one of early America's most influential poets.