Daniel Defoe, engraving by M. Van der Gucht, after a portrait by J. Taverner, first half of the &elipsis; [Credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London]
(born 1660, London, Eng.—died April 24, 1731, London) British novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist. A well-educated London merchant, he became an acute economic theorist and began to write eloquent, witty, often audacious tracts on public affairs.
A satire he published resulted in his being imprisoned in 1703, and his business collapsed. He traveled as a government secret agent while continuing to write prolifically. In 1704–13 he wrote practically single-handedly the periodical Review, a serious and forceful paper that influenced later essay periodicals such as The Spectator. His Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3 vol. (1724–26), followed several trips to Scotland. Late in life he turned to fiction. He achieved literary immortality with the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), which drew partly on memoirs of voyagers and castaways. He is also remembered for the vivid, picaresque Moll Flanders (1722); the nonfictional Journal of the Plague Year (1722), on the Great Plague in London in 1664–65; and Roxana (1724), a prototype of the modern novel.
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