author
Thomas Morton
1575–1646
A rebellious early colonial writer, he is best remembered for New English Canaan, a lively, sharp-edged book that pushed back against Puritan authority in New England. His life at Merrymount made him one of the most provocative English voices in early American literature.
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About the author
Born in England around 1575, he trained as a lawyer and later sailed to New England in the 1620s. There he became associated with Merrymount, a settlement in what is now Massachusetts that gained a scandalous reputation among neighboring Puritans for its maypole celebrations, freer social life, and more cooperative relations with Native peoples.
His clashes with Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay made him notorious. Colonial leaders saw him as disorderly and dangerous, while later readers came to value him as a witty critic of Puritan rule and a strikingly unconventional observer of early colonial life.
His best-known work, New English Canaan (1637), mixes description, satire, and social criticism. The book attacks Puritan leadership, comments on the land and its peoples, and has become an important text for readers interested in the many competing visions of early New England.