In his teens, he decided that his life's work would be to write the history of the struggle between France and England for control of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because of a series of physical breakdowns brought on by a harsh regimen of exercise and outdoorsmanship, he was kept from full-time work on the project until he was in his forties. In the interim he developed, in several preliminary literary efforts, the philosophical and literary stance that makes
France and England in North America the unified and deeply satisfying work of art it is.
Born in Boston on 16 September 1823 to Francis and Caroline Hall Parkman, Francis Parkman, Jr., began life at the top. His father's family tree took root in New England in 1633, when Elias Parkman immigrated to Massachusetts Bay. In addition to producing many ministers, the New England stock bore Samuel Parkman, who amassed one of Boston's great merchant fortunes during the eighteenth century and bequeathed it to his children, among whom was the historian's father. On his mother's side, Parkman claimed as an ancestor the brilliant John Cotton, one of the leading ideologists of seventeenth-century New England congregationalism, as well as close kinship with prominent New England families such as the Saltonstalls and the Brookses.
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