William Hickling Prescott

William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859) was an American historian, born in Salem, Massachusetts, to a prosperous legal family. An accident at Harvard left him nearly blind, and he wrote with the aid of readers and a writing frame. He devoted ten years to the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, published in 1837, and followed it with the History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843 and the History of the Conquest of Peru in 1847, narratives built on Spanish manuscripts copied for him in European archives and written with a novelist's sense of scene. His history of Philip II was unfinished at his death.