Daniel Defoe's life was packed with incident and drama. Born in the year of the Restoration of the Monarchy after the English Civil War, he remained a nonconformist throughout his life, actively rebelled against James II, travelled the country as a spy for King William and Queen Mary, worked in Scotland on active behalf of the historic Union of Scotland and England, helped launch the South Sea Company, was bankrupted frequently as a businessman, was imprisoned for libel and debt, and died a pauper.

Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe’s political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined.

Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers--his career as a writer. Maximillian Novak, a leading authority on Defoe, ranges from the writer's earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death. Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times--an age of dramatic historical, political, and social change. Indeed, through his many pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction, Defoe commented on everything from birth control to the price of coal, and from flying machines to the dangers of the plague. Beautifully and authoritatively written, this is the first serious, full-scale biography of Defoe to appear in a decade. It gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that lie behind some of the great works of English literature.

This meticulously edited Daniel Defoe collection includes: The True-Born Englishman_x000D_ An Essay upon Projects_x000D_ The Complete English Tradesman_x000D_ Everybody's Business Is Nobody's Business_x000D_ Second Thoughts are Best_x000D_ The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_x000D_ And What if the Pretender Should Come?_x000D_ An Answer to a Question that Nobody Thinks of_x000D_ A Humble Proposal to the People of England_x000D_ Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover_x000D_ A Seasonable Warning and Caution against the Insinuations of Papists and Jacobites in Favour of the Pretender_x000D_ The creator of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was quite politically active and that activism even resulted with his arrest, placement in a pillory and imprisoning. His most successful poem, The True-Born Englishman is a political satire that defends the king against the perceived xenophobia of his enemies, satirizing the English claim to racial purity. Defoe's notable publication, An Essay upon Projects, is a series of proposals for social and economic improvement. The Complete English Tradesman is an example of Defoe's political works. He discusses the role of the tradesman in England in comparison to tradesmen internationally, arguing that the British system of trade is far superior. The work that finally got him arrested was a pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, which ruthlessly satirized the High church Tories and the Dissenters. Besides these, Defoe published a great number of political essays, pamphlets and tracts._x000D_ Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), was an English writer, journalist, and spy, most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is noted for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, and he is considered one of the founders of the English novel.

The Life of Daniel Defoe examines the entire range of Defoe’s writing in the context of what is known about his life and opinions. Features extended and detailed commentaries on Defoe’s political, religious, moral, and economic journalism, as well as on all of his narrative fictions, including Robinson Crusoe Places emphasis on Defoe’s distinctive style and rhetoric Situates his work within the precise historical circumstances of the eighteenth-century in which Defoe was an important and active participant Now available in paperback

Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe’s political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined.