Biography Mercy Warren

Poet Biography

Mercy Otis Warren was born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where she lived until 1754, when she married James Warren and moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her husband and her brother James Otis were both involved in local politics, and their home became a place for revolutionary meetings.

Mercy played her part in suporting the revolution in 1772 with the publication of her play The Adulateur, the first in a long line of similar propagandistic pieces published anonymously.

Warren continued to write and publish after the war, issuing a volume of poetry under her own name in 1790 Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneousand and in 1805 publishing her three-volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution which contain more than twelve hundred pages, and became very popular with the revolutionaries and New Englanders.