Increase Mather's son Cotton Mather was much better known to succeeding generations of New Englanders than was the father, perhaps because he published much more than Increase Mather, and because he made the transition into the eighteenth century more easily. Cotton Mather's bibliography runs to some four hundred and forty-four printed items, with additional manuscript volumes such as the yet unpublished "Biblia Americana." By comparison, Increase Mather published some one hundred and two histories, tracts, treatises, and autobiographical fragments, some of which were printed from transcriptions made by persons who heard Mather preach them.

Increase Mather is an excellent representative of early New England Puritan writers because he wrote in nearly all of the available genres, except poetry, and while he did not freely experiment with form, he developed characteristically original approaches to the recording of his own times through historical narratives such as A Brief History of...