Daniel Defoe - Master of Fictions

Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, lived during a period of dramatic historical, political, and social change in Britain, and was by any standard a superb observer of his times. Through his pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction he commented on anything and everything, from birth control to the price of coal, from flying machines to academies for women, from security for the aged to the dangers of the plague. In his fiction he created a type of vivid realism that powerfully influenced the development of the novel. The publication of works such as Robinson Crusoe are major events because they shape the ways in which we see our world, so that ever afterwards thoughts of desolation and desert islands immediately evoke Defoe's masterpiece. We should not be surprised: Defoe always wrote to make things happen. During his career as an author, he was a provocative pamphleteer, journalist, and poet; but when he was not writing, he was, at times, a spy and a double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer. He was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned four times or more, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he never lost confidence in his ability as a writer and thinker. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers-his career as a writer. From his earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions. This life gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that went into such great works as Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana.

Table of Contents:
1: After the Revolution; 2: The education of a Dissenter; 3: Meditation of matters spiritual and secular; 4: Marriage and rebellion; 5: Financial woes and recovery; 6: Propagandist for William III; 7: The True-Born Englishman and other satires; 8: An age of plot and deceit; 9: From pilloried libeller to Government propagandist; 10: 'Writing history sheet by sheet': Defoe, The Review; 11: From public journalist to lunar philosopher; 12: Defoe as spy and Whig propagandist; 13: A 'true spy' in Scotland; 14: In limbo between causes and masters; 15: Journalism and history in 'an age of mysteries and paradoxes'; 16: How to sell out while keeping one's integrity (somewhat) intact in that 'Lunatick Age'; 17: These dangerous times; 18: 'A miserable divided nation'; 19: A change of monarchs; 20: Times when honest men must reserve themselves for better fortunes; 21: Corrector general of the press; 22: The year before Robinson Crusoe : intellectual controversies and experiments in fiction; 23: Robinson Crusoe and the variability of life; 24: After Crusoe: pirate adventures, military memoirs, and the South Sea scandal; 25: Creating fictional worlds; 26: Describing Britain in the 1720s; 27: Enter Henry Baker; 28: Last productive years; 29: Sinking under the weight of affliction.

About the Author :
Maximillian E. Novak is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was written numerous books and essays on Defoe's writing and thought. He lives in Hollywood, California.

Review :
... a major publishing event: it represents the first authoritative biography of Defoe in the new millennium as well as a magnum opus by the leading Defoe scholar of the past forty years. The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual Novak brings to his story of Defoe an encyclopedic knowledge of the economic, political, religious, and literary history of the period in which his subject lived. This enables him to present Defoe's life and ideas in their historical context with an informed and insightful perspective. The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual Novak presents his narrative in an engaging and graceful prose style that renders the mass of material he discusses easily accessible and comprehensible ... Novak is to be complimented in producing without question the most definitive life of Defoe in the last 270 years. It will stand as the benchmark of Defoe biographies for the twenty-first century. In sum, Novak's Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is a signal scholarly achievement, a monumental capstone to his distinguished career as a Defoe scholar. The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual Daniel Defoe: Master of fictions is a sturdy account of the man often credited with being Britain's first novelist. But, as Maximillian E. Novak shows in this scholarly and meticulous book, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Roxana are far from being the only reasons to read about Defoe's life. Everything about him, from his loving family life to his pragmatic support of the social and political Establishment which best served his interests, strikes one as utterly modern. As indeed, does his fatal love of luxury goods. Thank heavens he never had a Barclaycard. Kathryn Hughes, Book of the Week, Mail on Sunday 22 April 2001 ... scrupulous and intelligent, and gives a finely tuned portrait of an ambitious man often living against the flow of his world but illuminating it with extraordinary historical perspective. Jackie Wullschalger, Financial Times Novak is awesomely in command of his source material. His book gives a wide picture of Defoe's life and of the political, social and economic realities of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Diana Souhami, The Independent d