One of the most important Native American writers of the nineteenth century, William Apess has only recently begun to emerge from historical and literary obscurity. His autobiography, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apess, A Native of the Forest, Comprising a Notice of the Pequot Tribe of Indians (1829), for example, has come to be recognized as the first extended, written Native American autobiography. While articulating his nuanced sense of what it means to be a "Christian Indian," Apess's writing also provides a scathing and artful critique of the Puritan errand into the wilderness and the construction of empire generally. In rescuing the "native" from invisibility and caricature, Apess in fact underwrites the possibilities for a relegitimized American egalitarianism at once political and religious. As scholarly reconfigurations of the American nineteenth century proceed, Apess's work should emerge as pivotal.

Much of what is known of Apess's...