The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism

Pulitzer Prize nominee, 1991; awarded Critic’s Award for History

Commonly acknowledged as Anglo-America’s most popular eighteenth-century preacher, George Whitefield commanded mass audiences across two continents through his personal charisma. Harry Stout draws on a number of sources, including the newspapers of Whitefield’s day, to outline his subject’s spectacular career as a public figure. Although Whitefield here emerges as very much a modern figures, given to shameless self-promotion and extravagant theatricality, Stout also shows that he was from first to last a Calvinist, earnest in his support of orthodox theological tenets and sincere in his concern for the spiritual welfare of the thousands to whom he preached.