Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at fifty-nine after a life as a merchant, bankrupt, pamphleteer, prisoner and government spy. Born around 1660 in London to a Presbyterian family of Dissenters, he was educated at a dissenting academy rather than a university, which was closed to him by law. He went into trade in hosiery, wine and shipping, joined Monmouth's rebellion in 1685 and escaped the consequences, and went bankrupt in 1692 owing £17,000, an enormous sum, after insuring ships in wartime. He turned to writing to live. The True-Born Englishman in 1701, a verse satire defending the Dutch king by pointing out that the English are themselves a mongrel nation, was one of the bestselling poems of the age. The Shortest Way with the Dissenters in 1702 nearly destroyed him. Written in the voice of a High Church extremist demanding the hanging of Nonconformists, it was taken literally by both sides, and he was convicted of seditious libel, fined, pilloried and imprisoned. Robert Harley got him out, and he spent years afterwards writing for the government and travelling as an intelligence agent, notably in Scotland during the negotiation of the Union. He produced Crusoe in 1719, and then Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana in quick succession — realist prose narratives presented as authentic memoirs, which is much of the reason he is called a founder of the English novel. He wrote perhaps 500 works and died in 1731, hiding from a creditor. Crusoe has never been out of print in three centuries.

• Lived: 1660 CE – 1731 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: writer, journalist, pamphleteer