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Was tutored in Latin and Greek by the rector of Trinity Church in Boston and entered Harvard in 1811. In a bizarre accident, Prescott was blinded in the left eye by a crust of bread thrown in a dining-hall fracas. He abandoned plans to study law but went on to graduate in 1814 having earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa.
While traveling abroad the following year Prescott temporarily lost the sight in his right eye. With his vision permanently impaired, he aspired to the life of a gentleman-scholar. Prescott launched a career as a man of letters in 1821 with an essay on Byron that appeared in the North American Review. Over the next two decades he contributed regularly to the prestigious Boston literary journal. His most important articles and reviews, including seminal pieces on the theory and practice of historical composition, were later collected in Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (1845) and Critical and Historical Essays (1850).
Under the influence of George Ticknor, a friend and mentor who taught European literature at Harvard, Prescott began learning Spanish in 1824. Engrossed by the history of Spain, he committed himself to tracing its development into a world power. Employing secretaries to read him manuscripts sent from Spanish archives, Prescott set about writing a work of sound scholarship that would also interest a general audience. A phenomenal memory allowed him to compose whole chapters in his mind during morning horseback rides. Later he recorded them on paper using a noctograph, a special stylus for the blind. More than a decade later he finished The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1837), which enjoyed tremendous critical and popular success on both sides of the Atlantic.
Prescott's fame gained him entry into Spanish intellectual circles, greatly facilitating research on his next book, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), a sweeping account of Cortés's subjugation of the Aztec people. Prescott devoted his final years to chronicling the decline of the Spanish empire. He published The Life of Charles the Fifth after His Abdication (1856), a continuation of William Robertson's The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), but only managed to finish the first three volumes of The History of the Reign of Philip the Second (1855-58). William H. Prescott died of a stroke at his home in Boston on January 29, 1859.
What is Prescott's influence among modern-day historians? It varies. "Prescott has come to be thought of as a Romantic historian, more devoted to highly colored, dramatic narrative than to careful analysis of the economic, social, and political life of his period," writes Harvard Magazine. But Prescott's books would hardly have survived if they amounted to no more than scene-painting. Indeed, the most striking thing about them today is their scrupulous historiography. Prescott invents nothing. His accounts of the old Spanish authors who were his sources, his effort always to weigh the evidence, and the measured, judicious tone this gives to his writing, are the most characteristic qualities of his books.
However readers in different eras react to Prescott's characteristic blend of sober history and entertaining story, the place of his books among the American classics is secure. Prescott's "Conquests" are among the most widely read histories in the English language. Prescott certainly deserves to be celebrated as one of the principal figures in America's first great literary generation, and a great chronicler of Spanish history.

Sources: Random House Books author biography; Harvard Magazine (Winter 1996).