Certainly one of the most intelligent and best educated women of her day, Mercy Otis Warren produced a variety of poetry and prose. Her farce The Group ( 1776) was the hit of revolutionary Boston, a collection of two plays and poems appeared in 1790, and he three-volume History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Interspersed with Biographical and Moral, Observations appeared in 1805 She wrote other farces, as well as anti-Federalist pamphlet Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions (1788). There is no modern edition of her works, but there are two twentieth-century biographies, one facsimile edition of The Group, and a generous discussion of her farces and plays in Arthur Hubson Quinn's A History of the American Drama From the Beginning to the Civil War. Of her non-dramatic poetry, critics rarely speak Mercy Otis was born into a prominent family in Barnstable, Massachusetts. In 1754, she married James Warren, a Harvard friend of James Otis and John Adams, comes Warren was to become a member of the Massachusetts legislature just before the war and a financial aide to Washington during the war with the rank of major general. The friendship of the Warrens and Adamses was lifelong and close: Abigail Adams was one of Mercy Warren's few close friends. Following the war. James Warren reentered politics to oppose the Constitution because he feared that it did not adequately provide for protection of individual rights. Mercy Warren joined her husband in political battle, out the passage of the Bill of flights marked the end of their long period of political agitation.

In whatever literary form Warren wrote, she had but one theme-liberty. In her farces and history, it was national and political freedom. In her poems, it was intellectual freedom. In her anti-Federalist pamphlet, it was individual freedom. Throughout all of these works, moreover, runs the thread of freedom (equal treatment) for women. Not militant, she nevertheless urged men to educate their daughters and to treat their wives as equals.