Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Part I: 1660-1703
Chapter 1. Fire and Plague
Chapter 2.Merchant-Rebel
Chapter 3. Bankrupt
Chapter 4. Recovery
Chapter 5. Fugitive
Chapter 6. Prison
Part II: 1703-1714
Chapter 7. Four Hundred Thousand Words
Chapter 8. The Literary Effort of a Lifetime
Chapter 9. New Life
Chapter 10. A terrible People
Chapter 11. Political Maelstrom
Chapter 12. The Goliath of the Party
Chapter 13. A Team of Writers
Part III: 1714-1731
Chapter 14. Six Hundred Thousand Words
Chapter 15. A Discontented People
Chapter 16. A Penetrating Eye
Chapter 17. The Whole World in Motion
Chapter 18. Projects and Designs
Chapter 19. Changes and Disasters
Epilogue: Bred in the Bone
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Paula Backscheider is the Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar in the Department of English at Auburn University. She is the author of several books, including Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, both published by Johns Hopkins.

Reviews

For the first time everything we know about Defoe is presented in a single orderly sequence..A searching study of a complex man, one that is coherent and credible for our times. New York Times Book Review A very considerable work of scholarship, and the first to give this prolific writer the extended treatment he after all deserves. Washington Post Book World Paula Backscheider spins this absorbing narrative with meticulous scholarship and lucidity. Independent on Sunday

For the first time everything we know about Defoe is presented in a single orderly sequence..A searching study of a complex man, one that is coherent and credible for our times. New York Times Book Review A very considerable work of scholarship, and the first to give this prolific writer the extended treatment he after all deserves. Washington Post Book World Paula Backscheider spins this absorbing narrative with meticulous scholarship and lucidity. Independent on Sunday