Daniel Defoe

Four books here, and only two of them were signed. Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719 as the account of a mariner of York, written by himself, and readers took that literally for a while. Moll Flanders followed in 1722 as the confessions of a woman born in Newgate, and A Journal of the Plague Year that same year as an eyewitness record of 1665, which Defoe could not have been, being five at the time. The King of Pirates, also 1719, purports to be letters from Henry Every. Daniel Defoe lived from about 1660 to 1731, wrote several hundred pamphlets, worked as a government agent and intelligence gatherer, went bankrupt more than once, and stood in the pillory in 1703 for a satire the authorities read straight. What he actually wrote is still argued over: P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens spent years cutting works from a canon that had swollen past five hundred items on thin evidence.