The Life of William Apess, Pequot

Philip F. Gura offers the first book-length biography of William Apess (1798 1839), the Pequot Indian writer and Methodist minister who is generally regarded one of the first published Native American authors. Born in 1798 in Colrain, Massachusetts, Apess early life was marked by abuse, transiency, and alcoholism until, as a young man, he experienced a powerful conversion at a Methodist gathering. Following his conversion, Apess enlisted in the United States Army, accompanying troops sent to the Canadian front during the War of 1812. After the war, he returned to New England, was formally ordained as a Methodist preacher, and in 1829 published "A Son of the Forest," generally thought to be the first formal Native American autobiography. In 1833, Apess visited a Native American congregation at Mashpee on Cape Cod and quickly emerged as a leader in that group s fight for tribal rights against the government of Massachusetts. Arrested for his part in the Mashpee Revolt, Apess went on to write two books speaking to the racial prejudice he encountered during the Mashpee affair and agitating for Native American self-determination. In the years following the publication of his second and third books, however, Apess fortunes worsened, and he died, impoverished, in 1839.

Contextualizing Apess story richly in the broader geography and history of early nineteenth-century New England and writing for a broad public audience, Gura draws Apess out of relative obscurity and recenters him as a key figure in the history of American letters and ideas as well as Native American history."