Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in London in 1660. It was perhaps,
ineveitable that Defoe, an outspoken man, would become a political
journalist. As a Puritan he believed God had given him a mission to
print the truth, that is, to proselytize on religion and politics,
and in fact, he became a prolific pamphleteer satirizing the
hypocrisies of both Church and State. Defoe admired William III,
and his poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) won him the King's
friendship. But an ill-timed satire on High Church extremists, The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters, published during Queen Anne's
reign, resulted in his being pilloried and imprisoned for seditious
libel in 1703.
At fifty-nine Defoe turned to fiction, completing The Life and
Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), partly
based on the saga of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor; Moll
Flanders (1722); Colonel Jack (1722); A Journal of the Plague Years
(1722); and Roxana or the Fortunate Mistress (1724).
“Defoe’s excellence it is, to make me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, and to raise me while I read him, into the universal man.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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