First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism

H. Larry Ingle's First Among Friends, George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism, published by Oxford University Press in 1994, is a scholarly biography of George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, built from Fox's own journal and the surviving seventeenth century Quaker documentary record. Ingle was a specialist historian of early Quakerism. Its strength is that it is a peer reviewed critical biography that engages directly with Fox's own writings rather than relying on later hagiographic Quaker tradition alone, and it remains a standard scholarly reference on Fox specifically. Its limit is that Ingle offers his own interpretive reading of Fox's psychology and motivations, a reading not every Quaker historian accepts in full, so a claim resting on a specific interpretive judgment about Fox's character or intentions should be presented as Ingle's argument rather than as uncontested biographical fact.