Solomon Stoddard was the first writer in the history of early American literature to have been born in America. Unlike other early American writers, he did not see himself as an exile or an outcast. The distinction suggests how he distinguished himself--in idea, style, image, purpose--in American literary history. With him we begin to understand the indigenous. Stoddard was one of the first writers on the American frontier, and he wrote out of a desire to satisfy the needs of colonial life in that wilderness. The way he framed dominant issues of his age--conversion, sacraments, community, the instituted church, the ministered nation--reshaped New England in his lifetime, most of the rest of the colonies by the Revolution, and also the American frontier then and afterward, well into the nineteenth century. In a number of ways, his words became the American Way.

Stoddard became a writer only reluctantly. He...