A successful Boston lawyer, leading member of both Continental Congresses, and prominent diplomat, John Adams concluded his public service as the first vice president and then second president of the United States. His career in national public office, extending from 1774 to 1801, was the longest of any prominent early leader of the American Revolution. Yet Adams had a second, parallel political career that was just as important as his first and of even longer duration. From 1763 until 1814 he wrote newspaper essays, pamphlets, and a multivolume historical study, all devoted to political, constitutional, and diplomatic questions, in addition to an elaborate framework for his state’s government. The quantity of Adams’s published work far exceeds that of any other Revolutionary leader, and at the height of his intellectual powers in the 1770s his conceptual originality made him the leading penman of the Revolution.