The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With Original Illustrations Annotated

Daniel Defoe, (born 1660, London, Eng.--died April 24, 1731, London), English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of Robinson Crusoe (1719-22) and Moll Flanders (1722).

Defoe's father, James Foe, was a hard-working and fairly prosperous tallow chandler (perhaps also, later, a butcher), of Flemish descent. By his middle 30s, Daniel was calling himself "Defoe," probably reviving a variant of what may have been the original family name. As a Nonconformist, or Dissenter, Foe could not send his son to the University of Oxford or to Cambridge; he sent him instead to the excellent academy at Newington Green kept by the Reverend Charles Morton. There Defoe received an education in many ways better, and certainly broader, than any he would have had at an English university. Morton was an admirable teacher, later becoming first vice president of Harvard College; and the clarity, simplicity, and ease of his style of writing--together with the Bible, the works of John Bunyan, and the pulpit oratory of the day--may have helped to form Defoe's own literary style.