author
Wesley Frank Craven
1905–1981
A leading historian of colonial America, he also helped shape the official U.S. Army Air Forces history of World War II. His books are known for making early American history feel broad, lively, and deeply connected to public life.
1 Audiobook
The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624
by Wesley Frank Craven
About the author
Born in Conway, North Carolina, in 1905, Wesley Frank Craven built an unusually fast academic career, earning degrees from Duke and Cornell before joining the New York University faculty in 1928. He later taught at Princeton, where he became known as a scholar of early American and colonial history.
His best-known books include The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, The Virginia Company of London, 1606–1624, and The Colonies in Transition, 1660–1713. During and after World War II, he also played a major editorial role in The Army Air Forces in World War II, the landmark multivolume official history of the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Craven's work brought together careful scholarship and readable storytelling, whether he was writing about seventeenth-century colonization or the history of air power in wartime. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1981.