A captive of the Shawnee and Delaware from 1791 to 1794, Mary Lewis Kinnan escaped and told her story to New Jersey printer Shepard Kollock, who added embellishments and published the fifteen-page account as A True Narrative of the Sufferings of Mary Kinnan (1795). Widely read by a public hungry for sensational stories about Native American warfare on Western settlers, the pamphlet represents a curious mix of Kinnan's and Kollock's voices and the melding of providential narrative, sentimental fiction, and political propaganda that is characteristic of popular fiction and the captivity genre during the late eighteenth century.

Kinnan was the second child and eldest daughter of Zephaniah Lewis and Ann Doty Lewis of Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Little is known about Mary Lewis's early life. On 8 January 1778, at age fifteen, she married Joseph Kinnan, a sergeant in the New Jersey Regiments during the Revolutionary War. In 1787 the couple and their two...