Cotton Mather was born in Boston on 12 February 1663, the eldest child of Increase Mather and Maria Cotton Mather, who was the daughter of John Cotton, an elder statesman of the first generation of settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He lived most of his life in the Boston area, always in the shadow of his more illustrious father, with whom he shared the pulpit of the Old North Church. Unlike his father he was never to be chosen the president of Harvard College, a post he would have liked very much, but his reputation today exceeds that of his father, perhaps because he wrote so voluminously, having published some 444 works during his lifetime and leaving large volumes of work in manuscript, such as the learned and lengthy "Biblia Americana," a translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew with full annotation and commentary that fills several folio volumes.
