Thomas Shepard I was born in Northamptonshire, the son of a grocer's apprentice and a grocer's daughter, and entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a pensioner, or scholarship student, in 1620. He received his B.A. and M.A. and was ordained there in 1627. Silenced as a lecturer by Bishop Laud for nonconformity in 1630, he immigrated to Massachusetts Bay in 1635. Shepard was chosen pastor at Newtown (later Cambridge), where he remained until his death. He also served as unofficial chaplain of Harvard College, which was located at Newtown partly because of Shepard's presence there.

Shepard's two most significant literary productions are his journal (1747), an immediate recording of his life during the early 1640s, and his Autobiography (1832), a retrospective account. Each is a unique document of its kind from the early period of Puritan settlement in New England. Shepard's autobiographical narrative is explicitly teleological and didactic, describing the striking unsettledness of...