Early Writers.

The first Indian author to publish in English was Samson Occom, a Methodist missionary and author of Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772). In 1829 William Apess, a Pequot, published his autobiography, A Son of the Forest. He later published a brief autobiography in his Experience of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe (1833). Both autobiographies, similar to many spiritual confessions of the period, follow Apess's life history from a period of ignorance to Christian redemption. Apess, who became ordained as a Methodist, also became one of the most influential native protest writers in the nineteenth century. He saw alcohol abuse as one of the "fatal and exterminating diseases" introduced to the Indians by white civilization. In his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), a sermon preached in Boston, he criticized the Pilgrims for their hostile and duplicitous treatment...