A lively history of the Watch and Ward Society--New England's notorious literary censor for over eighty years. Banned in Boston is the first-ever history of the Watch and Ward Society--once Boston's unofficial moral guardian. An influential watchdog organization, bankrolled by society's upper crust, it actively suppressed vices like gambling and prostitution, and oversaw the mass censorship of books and plays. A spectacular romp through the Puritan City, here Neil Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase "banned in Boston."

After a devastating break-up with her fiancé and the death of her mother, Teresa Parrish felt her life had ended. She quickly accepted a job as a forensic specialist for the CIA in order to escape her pain. For practically three years, she indulged herself into her work sacrificing all hopes of ever finding love again. Things seem to quickly change when she is introduced to Doctor Jake by her boss accidentally or so it appears. A week later her closest friend introduces her to Benjamin. She slowly begins to open her heart that has been close to love for so long. The problem that arises for her is her ex-fiancé wants her back into his life. Now, she has three men fighting for her love and affection. The question is, will she find the happiness she deserves or will her search for true love end in destruction?

Prelude and aftermath of a lynching in Georgia, depicting the South's unsolved racial problem.

Misunderstandings between races, hostilities between cultures. Anxiety from living in a time of war in one's own land. Being accused of profiteering when food was scarce. Unruly residents in a remote frontier community. Charged with speaking the unspeakable and publishing the unprintable. All of this can be found in the life of one man--William Pynchon, the Puritan entrepreneur and founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1636. Two things in particular stand out in Pynchon's pioneering life: he enjoyed extraordinary and uniquely positive relationships with Native peoples, and he wrote the first book banned--and burned--in Boston. Now for the first time, this book provides a comprehensive account of Pynchon's story, beginning in England, through his New England adventures, to his return home. Discover the fabric of his times and the roles Pynchon played in the Puritan venture in Old England and New England.

Ben Porter is an MBA student unsure what his future holds. Franklin Abbott is a Boston Brahman, wanting to use his "old money" to do some good for the city he loves. Margaret O'Leary is a widowed Irish matron from South Boston who is indignant about most everything except her numerous friends and relations. This unlikely trio heads up Decency and Morality Now! (which has the unfortunate acronym of D.A.M.N!) This antipornography organization has seen its funding dwindle with the advent of the VCR, as well as the city's indifference to the issue. They come up with a way to "fight fire with fire" in order to increase their revenue stream. It's foolproof - unless they get caught, that is. Revisit Boston in the 1980s, a time of relative innocence, in this "slightly naughty-but-nice" fable, in which "things are not always what they seem." You never know what might get "Banned in Boston."

The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption: A Facsimile Edition reproduces William Pynchon's rare 1650 theological treatise about the Atonement. Written in the dialogue genre and deemed heretical by Boston orthodoxy, the book was burned on the city Commons. More than three hundred years later Meritorious Price is transformed in On Preterition, a fictional counterpart that is inscribed in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a landmark in the contemporary American novel. The reworking of the Puritan past in this recent postmodernist novel in part results from Thomas Pynchon's direct descent from his Puritan ancestor, but more than that, it points at important continuities in American literature. Introductory essays by Michael W. Vella, Lance Schachterle, and Louis Mackey explore questions of genealogy, theology, and postmodernism in the presentation of this facsimile edition aimed at scholars and readers of both Pynchons.