Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731) was born in London, the son of a butcher and candle merchant, and educated at a Dissenting academy in Stoke Newington. He worked as a merchant, political pamphleteer, journalist, and government spy before turning in his late fifties to the fiction that would secure his lasting reputation. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was published when Defoe was nearly sixty years old and was an immediate commercial success. He followed it with Moll Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Defoe's journalism and essays established him as one of the founders of modern English prose, and his career illustrates the extraordinary breadth of a writing life that encompassed politics, economics, theology, and fiction.