Daniel Defoe

William Minto's late 19th-century biography captures one of English literature's most extraordinary figures at the intersection of commerce, politics, and storytelling. Daniel Defoe lived about thirty lives in one: merchant adventurer, political pamphleteer, government spy, prisoner, and finally, at nearly sixty, the author of Robinson Crusoe, a novel that would become second only to the Bible in its global reach. Minto traces this remarkable trajectory from Defoe's education at a Nonconformist academy through his entanglement in the political upheavals of 1688, when England overthrew one king and elevated another. The biography illuminates a man of restless energy who moved between the counting house and the printing house, who knew both the inside of a prison cell and the corridors of power. Minto is particularly attentive to Defoe's multiplicity of identity, a writer who produced over three hundred works on topics ranging from the supernatural to economics, a man who shaped the rise of the English novel while simultaneously pioneering business journalism. This is a portrait of literary history's great survivor, a writer whose invention extended far beyond fiction into the art of reinventing himself.