11/Daniel Defoe. His Life and Work.“Robinson Crusoe”.

Daniel Defoe was born in 1660 in London, England. He became a merchant and participated in several failing businesses, facing bankruptcy and aggressive creditors. He was also a prolific political pamphleteer which landed him in prison for slander. Defoe died in 1731.

Having always been interested in politics, Defoe published his first literary piece, a political pamphlet, in 1683. He continued to write political works, working as a journalist, until the early 1700s. Many of Defoe's works during this period targeted support for King William III, also known as "William Henry of Orange." Some of his most popular works include The True-Born Englishman, which shed light on racial prejudice in England following attacks on William for being a foreigner; and the Review, a periodical that was published from 1704 to 1713, during the reign of Queen Anne, King William II's successor. Political opponents of Defoe's repeatedly had him imprisoned for his writing in 1713.

Late in life he turned his pen to fiction and wroteRobinson Crusoe, one of the most widely read and influential novels of all time.

Robinson Crusoe first published on 25 April 1719. This first edition credited the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.

The novel is a fictional autobiography of a young man named Robinson Crusoe, who dreams of going on sea voyages. Defying his father, Crusoe sets out on an adventure that was to change his life. On the journey, misfortune strikes and the ship is attacked by Turkish pirates and Crusoe is taken as a slave. After two years of slavery, he dramatically escapes and lands on an uninhabited island. The rest of the book tells us how Crusoe learns to live his life on an island for 27 seven years. While on the island, he finds a human foot print which is not his, and suspects to be that of cannibal barbarians. Crusoe even witnesses a human sacrifice where one of the men escapes from the barbaric act. Robinson rescues him, and names him ‘Friday’, in remembrance of the day he saved him. Friday is taught to speak English and becomes a great help and companion to Crusoe in his otherwise lonely life. Robinson finally escapes when a ship that has been a victim of mutiny arrives on the island. He helps the captain and the prisoners to retrieve the ship and eventually sets off back to London.

12/Jonathan Swift. “Gulliver’s Travels”.

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, MB Drapier – or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub.

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735). Gulliver's Travels is an adventure story (in reality, a misadventure story) involving several voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, who, because of a series of mishaps en route to recognized ports, ends up, instead, on several unknown islands living with people and animals of unusual sizes, behaviors, and philosophies, but who, after each adventure, is somehow able to return to his home in England where he recovers from these unusual experiences and then sets out again on a new voyage.