Ethan Allen and His Kin: Correspondence, 1772-1819

This two-volume collection of letters by and to Ethan, Ira, and Levi Allen and their kin not only relates the accomplishments and eccentricities of a family whose name is synonymous with colonial Vermont, but also recaptures a fifty-year span of social, political, and cultural history as seen firsthand from New England's backwaters. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys are remembered as great patriots, but the correspondence shows another side of a family whose major goal was increasing its own prosperity by acquiring land in the fledgling territory. Meticulously annotated and accompanied by thorough and lively introductory essays, the letters illuminate the power and paradoxes surrounding a remarkable group of men and women who were, the editors write, possessed of "expansive energy, ambition, skill, and wide interests; they also, of course, convey such common human flaws as greed, consuming single-mindedness, and deceit."