Parker’s life of Milton has long been accepted as one of the great literary biographies of the twentieth century, a unique accomplishment of scholarship based on a vast range of documentary evidence. Originally published in 1968, the biography was immediately acclaimed as “indispensable’, "authoritative’, as well as "controversial’, and Parker himself was described in The Review of English Studies as "a living library and a walking museum’. Gordon Campbell’s new and revised edition of Volume 1 forms a complete, self-contained, and wholly accessible account of Milton’s life which remains essential reading for the student of seventeenth-century literature, and for anyone who share Parker’s enthusiasm for Milton’s poetry.