(1660-1731) English writer. His Robinson Crusoe 1719, though purporting to be a factual account of shipwreck and solitary survival, was influential in the development of the novel. The fictional Moll Flanders 1722 and the partly factual A Journal of the Plague Year 1724 are still read for their concrete realism. A prolific journalist and pamphleteer, he was imprisoned 1702–04 for the ironic The Shortest Way with Dissenters 1702.
Defoe wrote numerous pamphlets and first achieved fame with the satire The True-Born Englishman 1701. His version of the contemporary short story ‘True Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs Veal’ 1706 first revealed a gift for realistic narrative.