Michael Wigglesworth

Born in England in 1631 and brought to New England as a child, Michael Wigglesworth grew up in the Puritan world that shaped both his ministry and his writing. He graduated from Harvard in 1651 and spent most of his career as the minister of the Congregational church in Malden, Massachusetts.

Wigglesworth is remembered above all for The Day of Doom (1662), a long religious poem about judgment and salvation that became extraordinarily popular in colonial New England. Written in plain, forceful verse, it helped make him one of the best-known poets of early English America.

Alongside his work as a pastor, he also practiced medicine later in life. He died in 1705, leaving behind a body of writing that offers a vivid glimpse into the fears, beliefs, and literary style of seventeenth-century Puritan New England.