Jonathan Edwards has usually been regarded as belonging more to the Puritan New England ministry than to a circle of early American writers. However, an examination of his career will show that he was far less successful as a parish minister in the early eighteenth century than he eventually became as a prose stylist and author of sermons, treatises, and even history. It is ironic, then, that Edwards is often depicted in the popular imagination as a staunch Calvinist minister, a "fire and brimstone" preacher closely associated with the Great Awakening, and a persecutor of wrongdoers. A more accurate picture of the real Edwards would reveal one who lost control of his congregation so completely that by 1748, he was the object of an inquisition and was subsequently dismissed from his pulpit and sent into virtual exile in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he spent almost ten lonely years as a...