In and of itself, the category of the bestseller presumes neither literary status nor political consensus. As Ruth Miller Elson remarks, “bestselling books… offer clues to the world view of that mythical creature—the average American.” LGBT bestsellers likewise offer clues about the average queer American—and a perspective on dominant trends and themes in queer culture and consumption since the 1970s. This chapter charts the history of the LGBT bestseller alongside a broader history of LGBT culture in the post-Stonewall era. It traces a shift in popular LGBT literature and publishing from separatism to assimilation, from its roots in the independent gay presses of the 1970s through the peak of the AIDS epidemic to the post-AIDS bestsellers popular with both queer and straight readerships. Texts considered include Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Larry Kramer’s Faggots (1978), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015).

To understand what puritans were doing in New England, we have to begin elsewhere, for the place of New England is itself not a beginning but a consequence – an effect of causes long in process before there ever were colonists at Plymouth, Salem, or Boston. Puritanism originated many decades before as a movement for reform of worship and the church in Scotland and England, a movement committed to a certain understanding of redemption – the passage from sin to salvation in the Christian life – that had wide-ranging social, political, and theological ramifications. This chapter maps the basic features of that movement and carries the dynamics forward into the “puritan revolution” of c. 1640–1660, including the theological currents that swirled beyond 1660. Tracking how Calvinist ideas circulated from the Continent to England and Scotland and what impact those ideas had on society, this chapter spells out the origins of puritanism and describes the battles and transatlantic dynamics that shaped American puritan literature.

John Winthrop, the most important founder of Puritan Massachusetts, organized much of his legal and political thought around the concept of covenant. In constitutional terms, this meant that while all authority comes from God it must be grounded in mutual consent to be legitimate. For Congregationalists like Winthrop, this applied to church as well as state, and the decentralized nature of congregational ecclesiology required active political intervention. In matters of the law, Winthrop combined traditional English institutions and procedures with covenantal ideals. He opposed the codification of Massachusetts’ laws, favoring customary or common laws, because he feared that, without discretion on the part of judges, the punishments handed out would lack equity and violate the covenantal ideal of charity. This charitable and communitarian ethos was exemplified in his irenic statesmanship and relatively lenient treatment of dissent among his fellow covenanting Congregationalists.