Kenneth Silverman, Cotton Mather biographer, dies at 81

The Puritan preacher Cotton Mather – a prodigy who took his place at the pulpit at 16, wrote no fewer than 437 books, and argued for both the existence of witchcraft and the importance of smallpox inoculation – approached his sermons much as a painter might approach a canvas. More than simple Sunday speeches, they were an opportunity to bend the minds of his Boston flock toward God in language that was artful and evocative.

Among Mather's many Boswells, Kenneth Silverman approached biography in much the same way. Trading bombast for rigorous research, he wrote acclaimed biographies of American innovators as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Morse, John Cage, Harry Houdini and Mather himself, in a research-intensive process that Silverman described as "wrestling with an angel."

Silverman, who died July 7 at 81, was a longtime English professor at New York University and a practicing magician on the stage and on the page, where he made the act of describing a person's life in all its knotty complexity appear almost effortless. His first major biography, "The Life and Times of Cotton Mather" (1984), won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Bancroft Prize, awarded annually by Columbia University to two leading works of American history or diplomacy.

"The author seems virtually to have taken up residence inside Mather's head and heart," the historian John Demos wrote in a review for the New Republic, "and the reader is repeatedly invited to see the world as Mather himself would have done - looking out."

While Mather was traditionally blamed for the bloodshed of the Salem witch trials ("his soft bookish hands," the poet Robert Lowell once wrote, "are indelibly stained with blood"), Silverman offered a more nuanced account of the incident. Drawing from thousands of letters, diaries and unpublished works, he offered a portrait of the preacher as a man whose actions were driven by an all-too-human mix of religious faith, political ambition and social courtesy.

His research led him to unearth documents at rural auction houses and hospital basements, and to dip into early colonial court records that were slowly being organized by Massachusetts archivists. At one point, he sat next to technicians who were bathing centuries-old documents in what he described as "troughs of liquid nitrogen." Their work enabled him to learn of a long-forgotten lawsuit over Mather's handling of an indebted estate.

The aim, and quite often the result, was a work of literary art derived from a mass of unwieldy facts. The concluding passage of "Cotton Mather," for instance, was a litany of objects that Silverman came across through his research.