Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist, pamphleteer, businessman, and novelist whose work helped shape the development of the English novel. Born in London around 1660, Defoe lived through political upheaval, religious controversy, commercial expansion, imprisonment, bankruptcy, and public punishment, experiences that gave his writing its unusual mixture of practical detail, moral pressure, and worldly knowledge. Before becoming famous as a novelist, he wrote widely on politics, trade, religion, economics, and public affairs.Defoe is best known for Robinson Crusoe, one of the most influential adventure novels in English literature, but his fiction also includes Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, Roxana, Colonel Jack, and Captain Singleton. His novels often present themselves as memoirs or confessions, drawing readers into lives shaped by danger, commerce, crime, survival, repentance, and social mobility. In Captain Singleton, Defoe turns to piracy, travel, and sea adventure while preserving the moral and psychological complexity that marks his best fiction. He died in 1731, leaving a body of work central to classic English literature, early realism, adventure fiction, and the history of the novel.
