"His greatest ancestor was England's most famous martyr. His uncle were Jesuit missionaries. His mother went into exile for her family's beliefs, and his brother was imprisoned for concealing a priest from government agents. John Donne too was expected to play his part in preserving the Roman Church from being exterminated by Elizabeth's Protestant regime. Yet the savagery of the religious conflict and the pain of personal loss made Donne ask if sectarian differences were really worth dying for. Instead he embarked on a personal reformation, a search for a God who could unite everyone." "Life, he realized, forced one to change. As a young man he broke with his family and sailed against the Spanish. He married for love, and sacrificed his career, his social standing and his prospects by doing so; yet by the end he would be firmly established as the Dean of St. Paul's in London. In the course of his metamorphosis from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, Donne emerged as one of the very greatest English poets, capturing and concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and spiritual devotion." "Following Donne through calm and storm, from Plague-ridden streets to the palaces of the English Renaissance, from the taverns and theatres on the Bankside to the pulpit of St. Paul's, John Stubbs's biography is a portrait of an extraordinary writer and his country at a time of bewildering and cruel transformation."--BOOK JACKET.