An Essay upon Projects

A political radical, Daniel Defoe spent a sizable portion of his adult life in prison. Keeping his spirits through it all, he turned out a number of satirical pamphlets including "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." Defoe's longer works feature a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction; A Journal of the Plague Year is a brilliant improvisation on historical record, and his books Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe are both fictional works that purport to be factual.