Royall Tyler came closer than anyone in his generation to answering the post-Revolutionary call for a native American literature. In The Contrast (produced on 16 April 1787 and published in 1790), the first commercially successful comedy written in America, and in The Algerine Captive (1797), one of the first American novels to be republished in England, he developed comic themes and characters that have informed American literature ever since. He also wrote one of the first American musical plays to be successfully produced (on 19 May 1787), May Day in Town, as well as an early fictional travel book, The Yankey in London (1809), and at least five more plays, numerous poems, essays, speeches, and sermons, and even a two-volume set of Vermont law reports.

Tyler was born in Boston on 18 July 1757 to a family that had been prominent in Boston politics and business for two generations. His father, a member of the Massachusetts House...