George Marsden's full-length biography of Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded as the definitive modern life of America's greatest theologian. This shorter book distills that work into a brief and readable account, following Edwards from his New England upbringing through the Northampton pastorate and the Great Awakening, the painful dismissal by his own congregation, the years at Stockbridge among the Mohicans, and his brief presidency of Princeton.

Marsden writes as a historian rather than a hagiographer, setting Edwards firmly in the eighteenth-century world he actually inhabited, with its colonial politics, its family networks and its controversies. For readers who want to understand Edwards but are not ready for a seven-hundred-page biography, this is the obvious place to begin. Part of Eerdmans' Library of Religious Biography series.