Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography
by Ola Elizabeth Winslow
Summary
Ola Elizabeth Winslow follows Jonathan Edwards from a Connecticut boyhood so precocious that he entered Yale just before his thirteenth birthday and was reading Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding within a year, through the pulpit of Northampton, Massachusetts, where he was ordained in 1727 alongside his aging grandfather and took full charge of one of the colony's largest and wealthiest congregations two years later. The book gives real space to the Great Awakening that broke out under Edwards's own preaching in the winter of 1734 and 1735, when, by his own count, some three hundred of the parish's eleven hundred young people sought admission to the church within a few months, and to the wider revival that swept New England after George Whitefield's preaching tour in 1739 and 1740.
The biography does not skip the sermon most readers associate with Edwards's name, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, delivered in Enfield, Connecticut, in July 1741, and Winslow complicates the popular image of Edwards as a shouting hellfire preacher by drawing on accounts describing his actual delivery as quiet and even toned, the terror in the sermon coming entirely from the argument rather than from theatrical performance. She follows the slow collapse of Edwards's own standing in Northampton a decade later, a bitter dispute about who deserved communion that ended around 1750 with his own congregation voting by more than two hundred to twenty three to remove him, a fall from a major pulpit into a frontier mission post among the Housatonic people at Stockbridge that would have broken a lesser theologian.
Winslow treats the Stockbridge years, unglamorous and remote as they were, as Edwards's most productive, the period in which he wrote his major treatises on the freedom of the will and the nature of true virtue, and closes with his brief, almost accidental presidency of what became Princeton, a post he barely lived to occupy before a smallpox inoculation meant to protect him instead killed him in March 1758. Reading it means following a serious intellectual biography of Puritan New England's last great theologian, dense with doctrine but grounded in a genuinely dramatic life, and it suits a reader curious how a man capable of that much rigor could also frighten a congregation into tears without raising his voice.
Historical Context & Significance
Winslow's biography of Jonathan Edwards, covering his life from 1703 to 1758, won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, making her the first woman to take the award on her own, after three women shared the very first biography prize in 1917 for a life of Julia Ward Howe. She had built her scholarly career teaching English at Goucher College in Baltimore before moving to Wellesley, and the Edwards biography drew on years already spent studying colonial American religious writing.
The book helped restore serious historical attention to a figure who had, by the twentieth century, been flattened in popular memory into little more than the author of one frightening sermon, and Winslow's fuller portrait, a rigorous philosophical theologian who was also a devoted father of eleven children and, in his final years, a missionary among Native Americans, shaped how later scholars of the Great Awakening approached him. It remains a standard reference for Edwards's life even as later biographers have added more theological analysis than Winslow, writing primarily as a literary historian, attempted.