Known by his fellow Harvard graduate Lemuel Howard as "that villain Church" because of his conviction for treason during the American Revolution, Benjamin Church today is better known to historians than to students of literature. Yet Church's literary output, albeit small by most standards, is significant because of its importance in the Revolution and its place in the development of a native American literature.

Born in Newport, Rhode Island, the son of Benjamin and Hannah Dyer Church, Church could trace his genealogy to the first settlers of Boston. With the poets Anne Bradstreet and Edward Johnson, his great-great-grandfather Richard Church traveled to America on John Winthrop's flagship, the Arbella, that landed in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Four generations later, with his great-grandfather, Benjamin Church, the renowned Indian fighter in King Philip's War counted among his ancestors, young Benjamin Church found himself a member of one of Boston's most honored...