Daniel Dafoe
- Daniel Defoe: BiographyDaniel Defoe became a merchant and participated in several failing businesses, facing bankruptcy and aggressive creditors. He was also a prolific political pamphleteer which landed him in prison for slander. Late in life he turned his pen to fiction and wrote Robinson Crusoe, one of the most widely read and influential novels of all time...
- Daniel Defoe: British LibraryDuring his lifetime Daniel Defoe produced, at a conservative estimate, 318 publications in many formats and on an extraordinary range of topics. Perhaps best known today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe is considered to have fundamentally shaped the novel as an emerging genre of English literature...
- Daniel Defoe: Poetry FoundationDaniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in 1660 in London, the son of a butcher (he began to use “Defoe” more frequently beginning in 1696). Defoe became a merchant but went bankrupt in 1692 and left the world of business in 1703. Defoe was an acclaimed and prolific pamphleteer and journalist who wrote scabrous attacks on supporters of King William III and Queen Anne, William’s successor. Defoe was often imprisoned for his inflammatory writings...
Research & Reference
- Daniel Defoe: BritannicaDaniel Defoe, (born 1660, London, Eng.—died April 24, 1731, London), English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of Robinson Crusoe (1719–22) and Moll Flanders (1722)...
- Defoe, Daniel: Credo ReferenceWith over five hundred authenticated titles ranging from brief pamphlets to multivolume works of journalism to his credit, Daniel is one of the most prolific of the major English authors. A master of realistic prose, Daniel has had an enormous influence on the development of journalism and the novel; some even consider him to be England’s first novelist...
Streaming Media
- Robinson CrusoeThe year is 1659. There is a shipwreck and the sole survivor Robinson Crusoe is washed ashore on a deserted tropical island. Suddenly faced with a hostile and unknown wilderness, he carves out a life for himself with his bare hands. And remarkably, he learns how to survive the maddening absence of human companionship and intense loneliness. Based on Daniel Defoe's immortal classic it is a story about the human spirit's ability to endure what seem insurmountable challenges.
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Foe was born in Cripplegate, London in 1660; the son of a tallow chandler. His father was a dissenter in religion with strong puritan views. Defoe attended a dissenters' academy in Newington and began working as a journalist; he also became a secret agent for the government. Defoe travelled widely and in his later years successfully published many works of fiction. He died in poverty in 1731.
Perspectives
Robinson Crusoe
A shipwreck's sole escapee, Robinson Crusoe endures 28 years of solitude on a Caribbean island and manages not only to survive but also to prevail. A warm humanity, evocative details of his struggle to tolerate his lonely existence, and lively accounts of his many exploits make Robinson Crusoe the most engaging of narrators.
Moll Flanders
Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great success, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in search of property and power. Born in Newgate Prison to a picaresque mother, Moll propels herself through marriages, periods of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back, only to return to the place of her birth as a popular prostitute and brilliant thief. The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates Defoe’s themes of social mobility and predestination, sin, redemption and reward. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the 1721 edition printed by Chetwood in London, the only edition approved by Defoe.
Defoe and the New Sciences
In his long career as a writer Daniel Defoe never tired of advocating the value of personal observation and experience; and he never wavered in his conviction that it is man's God-given duty to explore and make productive use of nature. In this first major study of Bacon's legacy to Defoe, Ilse Vickers shows that the ideas and concepts of Baconian science were a major influence on Defoe's way of thinking and writing. She outlines the seventeenth-century intellectual milieu, and discusses the prominence of Defoe's teacher Charles Morton among major Baconian thinkers of the century. She goes on to consider a wide range of Defoe's work, from the point of view of his familiarity with the ideals of experimental philosophy, and throws new light on the close link between his factual and his fictional works. In the process Vickers reveals a new Defoe: not only a thorough Baconian, but also a far more consistent writer than has hitherto been recognized.