Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949)

Milton in

America, 1997.

Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Milton in America, flows from an intriguing counterfactual: what if Milton had not dedicated his late years to writing his poetic masterpiece, but had instead fled England for a Puritan community in the New World? Ackroyd conjures up a vivid, alternative Milton who is, on the one hand, intrigued by the unfamiliar spirituality he encounters among the native Americans and, on the other, enraged to the point of violence by the arrival nearby of a Roman Catholic settlement.

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