Wigglesworth, Michael
Entry updated 14 July 2025. Tagged: Author, Poet.
(1631-1705) UK-born preacher, poet and author, in Massachusetts from 1638. Although his book-length narrative poem about the End of the World, The Day of Doom; Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement (1662), cannot be usefully deemed a work of Proto SF, its vivid narrative unpacking of America's future experience of the Second Coming, as depicted in the Biblical Book of Revelations, became immensely popular in seventeenth-century New England (see Eschatology; Religion). Though the poem eventually disappeared from the American literary canon, its influence was shaping. [JC]
Michael Wigglesworth
born Yorkshire: 18 October 1631
died Malden, Province of Massachusetts Bay: 10 June 1705
works (highly selected)
- The Day of Doom; Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, 1662) [poem: binding unknown/]
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