William Hickling Prescott

Harry Thurston Peck's biography illuminates the life of William Hickling Prescott, the Boston-born historian who virtually invented American historiography. Born to wealth and privilege in early 19th century America, Prescott suffered the cruelest irony: a mysterious accident in his twenties left him nearly blind, yet he produced some of the most luminous historical prose in the English language. He wrote of the Aztec and Inca empires, of Ferdinand and Isabella, dictating every word to his secretaries in darkened rooms. This biography traces Prescott's formation amid the competing literary cultures of the antebellum United States, showing how a wealthy amateur with classical education and unlimited leisure time transformed dry chronicles into narrative art. Peck, himself a classical scholar and man of letters, writes with deep appreciation for Prescott's literary achievements, situating him as the figure who broke free from Puritan scholasticism and forged a new, dramatic mode of American historical writing. The book offers both a portrait of a remarkable individual and a window into the emergence of American intellectual culture.