Synopsis
Constantly on the run from creditors, Daniel Defoe nonetheless managed to become a consummate pamphleteer and a great novelist. In this fascinating biography, West reveals the man who created the lead story, the obituary, and the gossip and advice columns. of photos.
Reviews
It's not surprising that West, an Englishman and the veteran author of numerous books on history and travel, is an admirer of "the fertility of Defoe's brain as well as the physical strength of his writing hand." West's life of the prolific if unconventional journalist who invented so much of his nonfiction that he moved easily into the novel, begins rather stiffly but becomes livelier as Defoe (1660-1731) grows up, writes more and gets into more trouble. West concedes at the start that he has not written "a definitive, academic, or even scholarly analysis of Defoe's writing." Nor has he produced a biography, he confesses, to replace Paula Backschneider's far more substantial Daniel Defoe (1989). Rather, inspired by Defoe's semifictional three-volume A Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain (to West the writer's masterpiece), he turns to Defoe's neglected, often imaginative travel books and the author's equally slighted run of lively and pioneering news-and-gossip papers of 1704-13. West's life, then, is for readers who want to know more about the compulsive writer, royal secret agent and bankrupt London merchant than the author of Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and his pseudo-histories and pseudo-memoirs. Defoe's method, West contends, was "the exercise of imagination?quite a different thing from invention or lying." Much more than a political pamphleteer and political spy, or the tireless hack penning bogus autobiographies, Defoe emerges in West's colorful (if sourceless) biography as an adventurer whose authentic life might have made his best book. 16 pages of b&w illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
West, a journalist and travel writer, provides a nonscholarly yet detailed and sympathetic biography of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), an author who was also adept at journalism, pamphleteering, and fiction and travel literature. Known today for such novels as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Defoe was initially famous for his polemical writings on politics, religion, and social issues. West also details 17th- and 18th-century England, and?though readers may periodically feel inundated by the wealth of information?establishes the political and social climate that shaped Defoe's life and literature. By the end, readers will feel compelled to return to the works discussed. Recommended for all public and academic libraries; those that have the more scholarly biography by Paula Backscheider (Daniel Defoe: His Life, LJ 10/15/89) will want to add West's book for readers who desire a more popular overview of Defoe's career and written achievements.?Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Few biographical subjects have led more intriguing lives than Defoe (1660^-1731). He is most famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe, but that ur-novel was a product of the penultimate of several careers. Defoe had been a rebel soldier, a feckless entrepreneur, a fearless pamphleteer, a confidant to King William III, a Tory government spy, and a pioneering political journalist before becoming a book writer who mixed fiction and fact so smoothly that literary detectives are still sifting the realities out of his so-called novels and the fancies out of his classic Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain. Bankrupted young, he later sat in the pillory for the sake of a free press and proved so politically independent that he was finally attacked by Tories and Whigs alike. Meanwhile, he sired seven children in his marriage to the long-suffering Mary Tuffley. During his last years, though a semi-invalid after a horrible operation for bladder stones, he ventured into business again, with similar sad results. He died fleeing his creditors and, as always, writing and publishing. Although West devotes most of this big book's latter half to synopses--with more extrapolation than exegesis in them--of the novels and the Tour and seems not to have done any original research, he writes splendidly, reanimating Defoe and his genuinely turbulent era (seventeenth-century England, in particular, was as brutal and dangerous as contemporary Bosnia) in a smart and engrossing popular biography. Ray Olson
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