William Ware is best known as the pioneering New York Unitarian minister who left the pulpit in 1836 to write the three earliest popular American religious novels. While Ware was not a Transcendentalist, he represents the broad spectrum of liberal Unitarian thinking that fostered the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Frederic Henry Hedge, and George Ripley. In all three of his novels Ware stresses the humanity of Jesus and the intuitive nature of the religious sentiment, notions Parker and Emerson later took to a further extreme.

Born in Hingham, Massachusetts, on 3 August 1797, Ware was one of ten children of Henry Ware, minister of the First Unitarian Church, and Mary Clark Ware. His older brother, Henry Jr., went on to become pastor of the Second Unitarian Church of Boston, editor of the Christian Disciple, and a professor at Harvard Divinity School. Mary Ware died in 1805; that year the...