Mary Rowlandson
American woman captured by Native Americans during King Philip's War
- Lived
- 1635–1711
Updated September 2026
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About Mary Rowlandson
Mary Rowlandson, née White, later Mary Talcott, was a colonial American woman who was captured by Native Americans in 1676 during King Philip's War and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed. In 1682, six years after her ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson was published. This text is considered a formative American work in the literary genre of captivity narratives. It went through four printings in 1682 and garnered readership both in the New England colonies and in England, leading some to consider it the first American "bestseller".
Biography from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Authors like Mary Rowlandson
Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers, free texts from Project Gutenberg. Last updated September 2026.