The King of Pirates

Born in London in 1661, the son of a butcher and tallow chandler, Daniel Defoe is widely considered the first English novelist. Educated at a dissenting school and intended for the Presbyterian Church, Defoe instead embarked on a career in trade, travelling to France, Spain, and Holland as a hosiery merchant and tile manufacturer. This venture ended in bankruptcy in 1691, by which time he had already begun writing political tracts. He worked as an agent for William III, and his myriad pamphlets, tracts and works of journalism indicate his capacity to elaborate satirically or otherwise the full spectrum of political and social perspectives. Defoe was in fact imprisoned in 1703 for a tract that attacked Dissenters. He was then employed by the Tory politician, Robert Harley, as a secret agent to gauge public opinion, and concurrently wrote a thrice-weekly newspaper called The Review almost singlehandedly.
Contentious pamphlets led to a second prison sentence in 1713, and only political manoeuvres enabled him to escape a sentence for libel in 1715.
In 1719, the seemingly autobiographical novel, Robinson Crusoe, appeared: a book that has influenced generations of readers, authors such as Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J.M. Coetzee, and many film-makers. Further works of fiction followed, including Moll Flanders (1722), Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Roxana (1724), all purportedly firsthand accounts of extraordinary lives. These powerful narratives in plain prose are the most famous works by a prolific writer whose vast and varied output encompassed history, biography, crime and travel writing. Defoe died in 1731, his contribution to the evolution of the English novel one aspect only of his extraordinary literary legacy.