Defoe, Daniel
Defoe, Daniel (c.1660–1731). Prolific English writer. Educated at Charles Morton's dissenting academy, Defoe was pardoned for fighting for Monmouth, and gaoled for bankruptcy in 1692, before becoming William III's unofficial apologist in the best-selling True-Born Englishman (1701). Imprisoned and pilloried for seditious libel for his satire on high-church bigotry, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), Defoe was recruited as a propagandist and intelligence agent by Robert Harley, writing the seminal propaganda journal the Review (1704–13), and reporting on the passage of the Act of Union (1707) through the Scottish Parliament. Re-employed by Harley in 1710, Defoe wrote government propaganda until 1714. Having finally made his peace with the Whigs, Defoe published Robinson Crusoe (1719), the first of the series of fictional autobiographies, including A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxana (1724), for which he has been confusingly labelled the first English novelist. Crucially significant as sources for early-18th-cent. British society, works like A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) have been intensively quarried by historians. Still hounded by creditors, Defoe, fittingly, died near his birthplace close by the real-life Grub Street.
J. A. Downie
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Defoe, Daniel
