Thomas Morton was the author of a single, though remarkable, book. His New English Canaan ... (1637) is an account of Indian life and manners, a history of early New England told from an unusual non-Puritan perspective, a tract promoting settlement of the region, and, most memorably, the story of bitter rivalry between the saintly settlers of Plymouth and the reveling Morton of Merry Mount. This tale, at once charming and acidly satiric, dramatizes conflicting values--the "righteous" versus the "wild"--at the heart of American experience and identity.

Morton was born about 1579 possibly in the West Country of England. He became an attorney, and his marriage in 1621 to a widow named Alice Miller almost immediately embroiled him in a series of lawsuits over property rights. Shortly after the termination of litigation, in 1624, he left for New England, establishing a fur-trading post at Mount Wollaston (modern Quincy), Massachusetts, which he renamed...