Daniel Defoe--arguably the most prolific writer in the English language and considered by many the father of the novel and the founder of modern journalism--was born at St. Giles, Cripplegate, in the heart of the City of London, probably in the fall of 1660. He was the third child and only son of James Foe, a prosperous tallow chandler of Flemish ancestry, and his wife, Alice. (The author assumed the more genteel name of Defoe when he reached the age of thirty-five.) Two years later, in 1662, the family left the Church of England to become Presbyterian Dissenters, who were barred from universities and from civil and military service. Consequently, young Defoe studied for the Presbyterian ministry at the Reverend Charles Morton's highly respected Academy for Dissenters at Newington Green north of London.
In 1682, however, Defoe decided against a career in the Nonconformist church and soon established himself as a merchant in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange. In 1684, he married Mary Tuffley, who brought with her a sizable dowry. During their lifetime together she bore him eight children, six of whom lived to adulthood. After serving briefly in the Duke of Monmouth's ill-fated rebellion against the soon-to-be-deposed James II, Defoe bought a pardon from the government, became a successful tradesman in various commodities, traveled extensively in England and on the Continent, and published several political tracts. Yet by 1692, reckless investments forced him to declare bankruptcy for ú17,000, then the equivalent of a small fortune. He eventually paid his creditors but was never entirely free from debt again.
It was perhaps inevitable that Defoe--an outspoken "freeman" of the City of London as well as a Puritan with a mission to print the truth even if it often meant satirizing the hypocrisies of church and state--would eventually find his calling as a prodigious pamphleteer during one of the most tumultuous periods in English history. His first significant publication was An Essay upon Projects (1697); the book (which exerted a lasting influence on Benjamin Franklin) advocated a number of imaginative economic and social reforms, including a system of national relief for the poor and education for women.
But it was not until the appearance in 1701 of The True-Born Englishman, a bestselling satirical poem ridiculing the opponents of William III, whom Defoe served as a propagandist, that he achieved fame. Notoriety soon followed, however, with "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters" (1702), an ill-timed mock-sermon lampooning High Church intolerance, which resulted in his arrest for seditious libel in 1703. Imprisoned and sentenced to stand in the pillory, the author won over the mob by distributing copies of "A Hymn to the Pillory" (1703), a poem declaring the inability of such a punishment to injure an honest man. As Defoe later wrote: "I have seen the rough side of the world as well as the smooth, and have in less than half a year tasted the difference between the closet of a king and the dungeon of Newgate."
Released through the intervention of Robert Harley, a moderate Tory minister, Defoe was soon pressed into service as a spy (he traveled throughout England and Scotland, actively promoting their union) and political journalist. From 1704 to 1713 he nearly single-handedly wrote the Review, a pro-government newspaper that was, nevertheless, the liveliest tabloid to appear in England up to that time. Eventually published thrice weekly, it even featured a modern "advice" column, and many of the articles still make entertaining reading.
A prolific and versatile writer, Defoe produced hundreds of works on every conceivable subject: politics, geography, crime, religion, economics, marriage, psychology, and even superstition. In 1715 he brought out The Family Instructor, the first of his bestselling books on personal conduct. After the accession of George I to the English throne in 1714 (and the fall of Harley), Defoe was once again arrested for debt, and his satirical pamphlets were judged treasonable. However, he was released through official influence and soon began editing the journal Mercurius Politicus from 1716 to 1720 on behalf of the Whig ministry. Afterward, in perhaps his most famous "collaboration," Defoe wrote for the Weekly Journal, or Saturday's Post, which enjoyed a circulation of some 10,000 copies a week, and later contributed to Applebee's Original Weekly Journal.
Then, in 1719 at the age of fifty-nine, Defoe turned to fiction, writing Robinson Crusoe. Partly based on the memoirs of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor, and others, the landmark book was published as autobiography, with the intention of preaching a sound moral and shaping public opinion. Likewise, his subsequent novels--Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724)--were brought out as diaries or autobiographies of supposedly real people. Nevertheless, as Virginia Woolf noted, Defoe had indeed "shaped the novel and launched it on its way." And James Joyce observed, "Defoe was the first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models and to infuse into the creatures of his pen a truly national spirit, to devise for himself an artistic form which is perhaps without precedent."
In his final years, Defoe's writing focused on the direct treatment of subjects that had always interested him--travel, economics, geography, and the social problems of England. His works during this period included the three-volume guide A Tour Thro' the whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), The Complete English Tradesman (1726), The Political History of the Devil (1726), "Augusta Triumphans: Or, The Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe" (1728), A Plan Of The English Commerce (1728), An Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street Robberies, and Suppressing All Other Disorders of the Night (1731), and The Complete English Gentleman (not published until 1890).
Daniel Defoe was still dodging creditors when he died of a stroke on April 24, 1731, at his lodgings in Rope Makers' Alley, not far from the area of London where he had lived as a child. He was buried two days later in the Dissenters cemetery at Bunhill Fields.

Moll Flanders is, according to Virginia Woolf, one of the "few English novels which we can call indisputably great." Written by Defoe in 1722 under a pseudonym so his readers would think it an actual journal of the ribald fortunes and misfortunes of a woman in eighteenth-century London, the book remains a picaresque novel of astonishing vitality. From her birth in Newgate Prison to her ascent to a position of wealth and stature, Moll Flanders demonstrates both a mercantile spirit and an indomitable will. This vivid saga of an irresistible and notorious heroine--her high misdemeanors and delinquencies, her varied careers as a prostitute, a charming and faithful wife, a thief, and a convict--endures today as one of the liveliest, most candid records of a woman's progress through the hypocritical labyrinth of society ever recorded. "Defoe seems to have taken his characters so deeply into his mind that he lived them without exactly knowing how," wrote Virginia Woolf. "Like all unconscious artists, he leaves more gold in his work than his own generation was able to bring to the surface."