Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe was an English writer, novelist and journalist who lived from about 1660 to 1731; his first-person narratives helped establish the modern novel's appetite for lived experience. Robinson Crusoe makes survival depend on labour, calculation and belief, yet the island story also raises difficult questions about property, colonial power and the self fashioned through possession. Moll Flanders follows a woman navigating poverty, crime, marriage and money; its confessional voice keeps moral judgment unstable while exposing the narrow routes available for social mobility. A Journal of the Plague Year adopts the texture of eyewitness testimony to reconstruct epidemic London, testing how records, rumour and fear shape collective memory. Robinson Crusoe offers the clearest view of Defoe's documentary realism, whereas Moll Flanders reveals how agile and ironic that method becomes when a narrator must continually remake her identity.