Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

In February 1676, during the brutal frontier conflict known as King Philip’s War, Native fighters raided the Massachusetts town of Lancaster and carried Mary Rowlandson and her three children into captivity. This first-person account records the roughly eleven weeks she spent among her captors, moving through the winter wilderness while wounded and grieving, sustained by her Puritan faith and her reading of Scripture. Rowlandson describes hunger, the death of her youngest child, and the tense negotiations that finally led to her ransom and return home. First printed in 1682, her narrative became one of the earliest American bestsellers and the founding text of the captivity narrative, a form that would shape colonial writing for generations. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.