THE most recent biography of Thomas Hooker was pub-
lished in 1891, and Cotton Mather's short biography included
in his Magnalia Christi Americana was the only previous orig-
inal account of Hooker's career—other accounts being abridg-
ments or padded versions of Mather's narrative. Mather's
presentation of Hooker as a model of ministerial piety con-
tains many useful insights into Hooker's religion, character and
deeds, and George Leon Walker's Thomas Hooker: Preacher,
Founder, Democrat ( New York, 1891) shows a scrupulously
researched mastery of the relevant facts concerning Hooker's
life.Unfortunately, the strength of one biographer is the weak-
ness of the other, and both writers have failed to give an ade-
quate treatment of Hooker's published works— Mather, per-
haps, because they were so familiar to his audience, and Walker
because they were so foreign.

The absence of a modern treatment of Hooker's life is in
itself a good reason to retell the story of this great preacher
and leader of our first Puritan settlers.A deeper and more
satisfying understanding of the Puritan enterprise has been
created in the last eighty years; Hooker's career deserves to be
reconsidered with the scholarly accessions of the twentieth
century in mind, and a biographical study will further deepen
our knowledge of the New England experiment. Walker per-
petuated the misleading version of Hooker's significance so
dear to nineteenth-century American historians.From George
Bancroft to Vernon Parrington writers have attempted to por-
tray Hooker's removal to Connecticut as a type of the Ameri-
can Revolution; Perry Miller has since shown us that this
interpretation will not do. Hooker was a preacher first and
foremost, a founder only in a secondary sense, and hardly a

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