As pamphleteer, essayist, satirist, diarist, scientific writer, poet, and experimental agriculturalist, Landon Carter was perhaps the most prolific author in Virginia during the two decades before the Revolution. He produced at least four major pamphlets, and nearly fifty essays in colonial gazettes and British newspapers have been identified as his. There also exists a considerable body of his satiric verse in the gazettes and in manuscript. His diary is the longest one to survive from colonial Virginia and is for the student of colonial culture one of the most important colonial private journals. One of his essays on the weevil fly won him election to the American Philosophical Society. A man with an obsession for knowledge, Carter amassed a major Southern colonial library, perhaps including a thousand or more titles during his prime years of writing.

Carter was born on 18 August 1710, the fourth of five sons of Robert...