About the Author:
Following his Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1969, Benjamin Franklin V has taught at the University of Michigan; the University of Athens, Greece; the University of Helsinki, Finland; the University of Hannover, Germany; and the University of South Carolina, where he holds the rank of Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He has written about American authors from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

The decade of the 1720s witnessed major changes in American culture. The great Puritan Cotton Mather died, and the autodidact Benjamin Franklin began his writing career. In his activities during the latter half of the decade, John Adams (1705-1740) reflected some of the dynamics of the time. A Congregational minister in Newport, this member of the Harvard class of 1721 became involved in an ongoing debate within his faith over which people are qualified to receive Holy Communion. The established minister, Nathaniel Clap, withheld the ordinance from his parishoners for years; Adams and Clap's disaffected flock established the Second Congregational Church of Newport, where Adams offered the Lord's Supper. During this time, Adams wrote poems and essays. Influenced by Addison, Dryden, and Pope, among other recent or current British authors, Adams helped introduce neoclassical verse and the sophisticated Addisonian essay to American literature.