Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was a hosier, tile-maker, secret agent, bankrupt, pilloried pamphleteer and the most prolific journalist of his age, who at fifty-nine wrote Robinson Crusoe, the story of a castaway’s twenty-eight years on an island, told as fact, and invented the English novel almost by accident. Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana followed in the next five years, each a first-person account of a life on the margins told with a tradesman’s eye for detail and money. He wrote perhaps five hundred works, and died hiding from creditors.