That night I read my long ago neighbor's poetry with sharpened attention and was astonished at the power and intelligence of her voice. In class the next day, I read aloud some of my favorite lines and the students were thrilled. But when they asked me about her life, I had to admit that I knew nothing about her except that she had once lived in Ipswich.

Curious, I started to dig around for details about her life. At the local library, I found that only two biographies had been written and both were out of print. Suddenly Anne's life seemed like a mystery, one I became increasingly intent on solving: Who was this woman? How had she managed to write such extraordinary poems? She must have been well-educated, which struck me as remarkable for a woman of her time.

Over the next fourteen years, I embarked on a search for the hidden of life of Mistress Bradstreet. To my delight, I found that she was a courageous, likeable, and fascinating woman, who bore eight healthy babies, founded three Massachusetts towns, and wrote the first book of poetry from the New World. A brave and determined pioneer, she seemed the perfect antidote to her more famous modern counterparts.

I traveled to the Massachusetts towns where Anne had lived, read and re-read Anne's poems, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to be eighteen years old and struggle through the ordeal of settling a new country. The closer I drew, the more she receded, like a ghost.

In many ways, the book Mistress Bradstreet is the story of my quest for Anne, a quest that has never really ended. Despite all of my research, she remains stubbornly bewildering, a chimera, at the same time that she inspires me with her courage and grace.

During an era that was hostile to intellectual women, she penned more lines of important verse than many of the men of her generation. Her political commentary and her explanation of the role of the New World in human history would help Americans of the next generations understand who they were and what it meant to be American. Like that famous intellectual of the next century, Ben Franklin, her ideas would help shape a country and a national identity.

Strange though it sounds, Anne's cultural sway and her enormous popularity during her own time suggests that she may have had more in common with Jerry Garcia than I realized when I began this journey.