The many baffling, colorful facets of Daniel Defoe's person and career come into striking focus in this new biography by Richard West. Here is Defoe the tradesman, soldier, and spy, the journalist, novelist, satirist, newsman, and pamphleteer. Consistent only in his failure as a businessman, Defoe would never manage to provide adequately for his wife and their six children, neither in commerce nor by his undeniably prolific pen - a pen that in the year following Defoe's imprisonment, by West's estimate, wrote a half million words. That same year Defoe also founded a newspaper, The Review, for which he created such features as the lead story, the obituary, foreign news analysis, the gossip column, and the advice column. With a finesse and independence of spirit not unlike his subject's own, West unfolds his story of a maverick Defoe, a Puritan but no prude, a Dissenter without a constituency, a hack who never failed to pursue the truth and by the way also produced "Moll Flanders," " "Roxana," "A Journal of the Plague Year," and "Robinson Crusoe."
- ISBN10 0786705574
- ISBN13 9780786705573
- Publish Date 17 August 1998
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 14 July 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc
- Edition Carroll & Graf ed.
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 446
- Language English