Mercy Otis Warren is perhaps most widely recognized as the author of several Revolutionary War-era dramatic satires which castigated Thomas Hutchinson and his Massachusetts Loyalist associates, but she also wrote serious drama, poetry, prose, and a history of the Revolution which may be of even more value than her propaganda pieces. When her Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous, containing her two formal verse tragedies, came out in 1790. Alexander Hamilton wrote to her that "in the career of dramatic composition at least, female genius in the United States has outstripped the Male." And a recent critic, Gerald Weales, in surveying her career, remarks. "The best of Mercy Warren is almost certainly her prose--the History, the political pamphlet, the letters," and he goes on to argue that all her work is of interest for its revelation of an "urgent intelligence" and "passionate morality." Because her intelligence and morality were devoted to...