Ola Elizabeth Winslow

Ola Elizabeth Winslow (January 5, 1885 in Grant City, Missouri – September 27, 1977 in Damariscotta, Maine) was an American historian, biographer, and educator. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her biography of Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century American theologian whose basic writings she edited for Signet Classics.

Born in Missouri, Winslow was an instructor at College of the Pacific from 1909 to 1914, when she earned a master's degree from Stanford University. She was professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore (1914–1944) and at Wellesley College (1944–1977, emeritus after 1950).

Winslow earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1922 with a thesis that was later published as a book with the title Low Comedy as a Structural Element in English Drama from the Beginnings to 1642.

Winslow died in Maine at age 92.

Books

• Low Comedy as a Structural Element in English Drama from the Beginnings to 1642 (Menasha, WI, 1926) – "originally presented as the author's thesis, University of Chicago, 1922"
• Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography (Macmillan, 1940) – 1941 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
• Meetinghouse Hill, 1630–1783 (Macmillan, 1952) – about the Dorchester church and settlement, now in Boston
• Master Roger Williams: a biography (Macmillan, 1957)
• John Bunyan (Macmillan, 1961) – biography of John Bunyan
• Samuel Sewall of Boston (Macmillan, 1964)
• Portsmouth: the life of a town (Macmillan, 1966)
• John Eliot, apostle to the Indians (Houghton Mifflin, 1968)
• "And plead for the rights of all": Old South Church in Boston, 1669–1969 (Boston: Nimrod, 1970)
• A Destroying Angel: The Conquest of Smallpox in Colonial Boston (Houghton Mifflin, 1974)

As editor

• Harper's Literary Museum (Harper & Bros, 1927), compiled by Winslow – Subject: American literature—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775 – first of a series designed by George Boas, not continued – reissued as Harper's literary museum, a compendium of instructive, entertaining, and amusing matter, selected from early American writings (Arno, 1972)
• American Broadside Verse from Imprints of the 17th & 18th Centuries (Yale University Press, 1930), selected and edited with an introduction by Winslow
• Jonathan Edwards: basic writings, selected and edited with a foreword by Winslow (New American Library, Signet Classics, 1966)
• The Pilgrim's Progress: with a critical and biographical profile of the author by Ola Elizabeth Winslow (Grolier, The World's Great Classics, 1968), Grolier Edition of the 1820 classic by John Bunyan