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Daniel Defoe (Cyclopedia of World Authors)

Daniel Defoe (dih-FOH), best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, is a writer whose journalistic writing still has an appeal because of its assertion of commonsensical principles and whose works of fiction are convincing because of the same common sense and esteem for fact.

Few writers have written more voluminously and continuously than Defoe. Though there is uncertainty about the authorship of some works attributed to him, he has been credited with 570 separate works—newspapers, pamphlets, treatises, biographies, poems, guidebooks, and novels. It was in the midst...

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