"Widely regarded as the most important narrative of seventeenth-century New England, William Bradford's Of Plimmoth Plantation is one of the founding documents of American literature and history. In William Bradford's Books this portrait of the religious dissenters who emigrated from the Netherlands to New England in 1620 receives perhaps it sharpest textual analysis to date - and for the first since that of Samuel Eliot Morison two generations ago. Far from being the gloomy elegy that many readers find, Bradford's history, argues Douglas Anderson, demonstrates remarkable ambition and subtle grace as it contemplates the adaptive success of a small community of religious exiles.

Anderson offers a fresh literary and historical account of Bradford's accomplishment, exploring the context and the form in which the author intended his book to be read."--Jacket.