Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). British novelist and journalist, the son of a London butcher. In 1703 he published a political satire that led to his imprisonment for 15 months in Newgate jail. He then became a government spy. Defoe published more than 200 volumes altogether, but is now remembered chiefly for his novels Robinson Crusoe (1719), based on the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned for five years on a desert island, and Moll Flanders (1722).
