Sarah Kemble Knight's account of her journey on horseback from Boston to New York in the early eighteenth century ranks as one of the finest and earliest examples of witty prose and the sort of broad humor and characterization that would be typical of later American writers. Her journal gives intimate details of travel in early America, as well. Her work is secular, in an age when most published writing was done by ministers, and her attitude toward religion, though pious, marks the change in her time from an earlier, more somber view. Finally she reveals herself as a resourceful woman, an entrepreneur well able to handle matters of business.

Sarah Kemble was a third-generation American, daughter of Thomas Kemble, a Boston merchant, and Elizabeth Trerice, whose family settled in Charlestown in the 1630s. Sometime before 1689 she married Richard Knight, who by some accounts was a sea captain...