The most evocative and richly contextualised account of the Salem Witch Trials in print.
Fourth Estate also publish \'Ann the Word\', the biography of Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, and his novels \'Taking Apart the Poco Poco\' and \'Fat Hen\'..
He is a playwright, reviewer, biographer and novelist.
About author(s): Richard Francis is a visiting lecturer at Bath University.
Through Sewall\'s life, we gain access to the lost wonders of the New World.
We witness the comical courtship of Sewall\'s later years; his attempts to square a prodigious appetite with the scruples of piety, and a disagreement that led him to pen the first anti-slavery tract ever written in America.
In this intriguing biography, Richard Francis rediscovers a period of great cultural change and historical development, enabling us to see the colonial Puritans not as grim ideologues but as flesh-and-blood people.
Rarely remarked upon before now, this extraordinary act not only marked a turning point for Sewall, but arguably set the fledgling nation on the path that it has followed to this day.
Five years after pronouncing judgment at the trials, Sewall walked into a Boston church and recanted the guilty verdicts, praying for forgiveness.
Out of the struggle to maintain cohesion emerged the forces that drove the Salem tragedy.
Everywhere there was conflict, schism and violence, from the pagan Indians to dissenting settlers.
Sewall\'s life encompassed the tensions that faced the second generation colonists, caught between the staunch conservatism of the Founding Fathers and the possibilities their new world offered.
Biographer and novelist Richard Francis brings the reality back into focus with the story of Samuel Sewall, New England Puritan, Salem trial judge, publisher, entrepreneur and writer.
Yet the actual events have ben overshadowed by the myth.
Immortalised by Arthur Miller\'s \'The Crucible\', the witch-hunt is now part of our vocabulary.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 have assumed mythical status.
The most evocative and richly contextualised account of the Salem Witch Trials in print
