Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was an English writer, journalist, and merchant often credited as the father of the English novel. Born Daniel Foe in London to a family of religious dissenters, he changed his name around 1695 to suggest genteel origins. Before turning to fiction, he was a hosiery trader, a political pamphleteer, and a government spy; he was even pilloried and imprisoned for his satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702). At fifty-nine, he published Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose tale of shipwreck and self-reliance captured readers worldwide and never went out of print. He followed it with Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), among others. Defoe's realist narrative style and eye for social detail laid the groundwork for the entire tradition of English prose fiction.