SOURCE: “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1988, p. 239-61.

In the essay that follows, Derounian discusses the dissemination and reception of Rowlandson's work from the first printing to the early 1800s, investigating various editions and how they served the book's different audiences.

One of the first American best sellers with an estimated minimum sale of 1,000 in 1682 (Mott 303), Mary Rowlandson's only work—her dramatic first-person account of three months' captivity among the Indians in New England—was published in four editions in 1682 alone. The first edition (lost except for eight leaves used as lining papers in Samuel Willard's Covenant-Keeping) appeared in Boston; the second (the “second Addition”) and third (the “second Edition”) in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the fourth in London. Rowlandson's narrative maintained its popularity throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; in...