It would be interesting to know how many young people of the last quarter century first encountered a piece of the American past, outside the normally dreary confines of textbook accounts, in Edmund S. Morgan's skillfully drawn portrait of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The most successful volume in Little, Brown's "Library of American Biography," The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958), frequently appears on reading lists for U.S. history courses in American colleges and universities, and the book is entirely suitable for use in advanced classes in secondary schools. A beautifully written volume, The Puritan Dilemma introduces the reader to the social and economic life, the evolving political institutions, and the religious experience of early America by tracing John Winthrop's life from youth to maturity, when he decided to emigrate from England, and through the two decades in which he played a...