Gulliver's Travels 3

Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726, is Jonathan Swift’s best known novel. Throughout the four stories, ship’s surgeon Gulliver travels to distant lands, meets strange new peoples like the diminutive Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdingnags, defends his ship from a pirate attack, and is marooned on a deserted island. Written with disarming simplicity and careful attention to detail, this classic is diverse in its appeal. For children, it remains an enchanting fantasy. For adults, it is a witty parody of political life in Swift's time and a scathing send-up of manners and morals in 18th-century England.

Born in 1667, Jonathan Swift was an Irish writer and cleric, best known for his works Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Journal to Stella, amongst many others. Educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity in February 1702 and eventually became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Publishing under the names of Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, and M. B. Drapier, Swift was a prolific writer who, in addition to his prose works, composed poetry, essays, and political pamphlets for both the Whigs and the Tories, and is considered to be one of the foremost English-language satirists, mastering both the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. Swift died in 1745, leaving the bulk of his fortune to found St. Patrick's Hospital for Imbeciles, a hospital for the mentally ill, which continues to operate as a psychiatric hospital today.

Jonathan Swift(1667- 1745), a poet, satirist, and clergyman, published many satirical works, among them A Modest Proposal. Robert DeMaria, Jr. is Henry Noble McCracken Professor of English at Vassar College. He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature.