The Unredeemed Captive is a novel written by John Putnam Demos that was published in 2011. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won the Francis Parkman Prize. Demos is also a historian in addition to being an author, and he has won the Bancroft Prize before. In this novel, he has constructed a plot based on the history of colonial Massachusetts, where the Puritans from England were determined to make the natives a “civilized population.”
In the winter of 1704, the conflict between the Native Americans and the Puritans rose quickly. While the Puritans believed that they were helping the Natives by teaching them and forcing them to accept their ways, the Natives had no such desire to assimilate and follow the customs of the Puritans. In the village of Deerfield, a band of Native Americans abducted a Puritan minister and his kids. The Puritan minister, named John Williams, was eventually released, and so were the rest of his kids, except for his daughter. She willingly chose to stay with the Natives and eventually wed one of them. The Unredeemed Captive captures the environment in which the English and the Natives and even the French fought over the unbridgeable gap between their cultures.
