Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was born around 1660, the son of a London Presbyterian candle maker, and grew up among the Dissenters; he was a merchant, several times bankrupt, put in the pillory in 1703 for an ironic pamphlet on the persecution of Dissenters, then a government agent and an indefatigable journalist. He was nearly sixty when the book that made his fame appeared, and he published a mass of pamphlets, travel narratives and treatises on trade. He died in London in 1731, probably in hiding from his creditors.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelRobinson CrusoeDaniel Defoe · 1719Literature