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Apparently doomed to an obscure Anglican parsonage in Laracor, Ireland, even after he had written his anonymous masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (c.1696), Swift turned a political mission to England from the Irish Protestant clergy into an avenue to prominence as the chief propagandist for the Tory government. His exhilaration at achieving importance in his forties appears engagingly in his Journal to Stella (1710--13), addressed to Esther Johnson, a young protegee for whom Swift felt more warmth than for anyone else in his long life. At the death of Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories in 1714, Swift became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. In Ireland, which he considered exile from a life of power and intellectual activity in London, Swift found time to defend his oppressed compatriots, sometimes in such contraband essays as his Drapier's Letters (1724), and sometimes in such short mordant pieces as the famous A Modest Proposal (1729); and there he wrote perhaps the greatest work of his time, Gulliver's Travels (1726). Using his characteristic device of the persona (a developed and sometimes satirized narrator, such as the anonymous hack writer of A Tale of a Tub or Isaac Bickerstaff in Predictions for the Ensuing Year, who exposes an astrologer), Swift created the hero Gulliver, who in the first instance stands for the bluff, decent, average Englishman and in the second, humanity in general. Gulliver is a full and powerful vision of a human being in a world in which violent passions, intellectual pride, and external chaos can degrade him or her---to animalism, in Swift's most horrifying images---but in which humans do have scope to act, guided by the Classical-Christian tradition. Gulliver's Travels has been an immensely successful children's book (although Swift did not care much for children), so widely popular through the world for its imagination, wit, fun, freshness, vigor, and narrative skill that its hero is in many languages a common proper noun. Perhaps as a consequence, its meaning has been the subject of continuing dispute, and its author has been called everything from sentimental to mad. Swift died in Dublin and was buried next to his beloved "Stella." (Bowker Author Biography) — biography from Gulliver's Travels… (more)
Disambiguation Notice

Please be careful not to mistakenly combine full versions and abridged versions of Jonathan Swift's works.

Gulliver's Travels 17,020 copies, 159 reviews
Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics) 3,775 copies, 60 reviews
A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works (Author) 1,307 copies, 19 reviews
A Modest Proposal [essay] 1,238 copies, 45 reviews
Gulliver's Travels 1,037 copies, 11 reviews
Gulliver's Travels 980 copies, 14 reviews
A Tale of A Tub (Author) 554 copies, 13 reviews
Gulliver's Travels 494 copies, 3 reviews
A Tale of a Tub and Other Works 369 copies, 3 reviews
Complete Poems 115 copies
Journal to Stella 85 copies, 1 review
The Battle of the Books 68 copies, 1 review
Satires and Personal Writings 65 copies, 1 review
Gulliver's Travels [1996 TV miniseries] (Author) 56 copies, 6 reviews
Gulliver in Lilliput (Original Story) 37 copies, 1 review
Opere scelte 13 copies
Gullivers Reisen (Author) 12 copies
A Voyage to Brobdingnag (Author) 11 copies
Poems 9 copies
Premier voyage de Gulliver 6 copies, 1 review
A Selection of Poems 6 copies, 1 review
Miscellanies 6 copies
Gullivers Reisen (Author) 4 copies
Opere 3 copies
Contro il libero pensiero 3 copies, 1 review
Gulliver, viaje a Liliput. 3 copies, 1 review
Scritti satirici e polemici (Author) 3 copies
Satiren. 3 copies
Celtic Poets 2 copies
Robin Hood 2 copies
Gullivers rejser, andet bind 2 copies, 2 reviews
Dilbert Bunch 2 copies
Miscellanies. 2 copies
Sententies 2 copies
Beteja e librave 1 copy, 1 review
Gulliverove cesty 1 copy, 1 review
Satiren 1 copy
Essays 1 copy
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (Contributor, some editions) 897 copies, 7 reviews
English Essays: From Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay (Contributor) 472 copies, 2 reviews
Literature: The Human Experience (Contributor) 333 copies
The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (Contributor) 189 copies
The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (Contributor) 151 copies
Major British Writers, Volumes I and II (Contributor) 121 copies, 1 review
The World of Mathematics, Volume 4 (Contributor) 119 copies, 1 review
The Norton Book of Travel (Contributor) 110 copies, 1 review
The Utopia Reader (Contributor) 109 copies, 1 review
The Norton Book of Friendship (Contributor) 92 copies
Gulliver's Travels [2010 film] (Original book) 63 copies, 1 review
Faber Book of Ballads (Contributor) 49 copies, 1 review
Gulliver's Travels [1939 animated film] (Original book) 46 copies, 3 reviews
Modern Arthurian Literature (Contributor) 30 copies
Alien Invasion Short Stories (Contributor) 29 copies
Famous and Curious Animal Stories (Contributor) 28 copies, 1 review
A Book of Essays (Contributor) 26 copies
Classic Essays in English (Contributor) 22 copies
The Lucky Bag: Classic Irish Children's Stories (Contributor) 20 copies, 1 review
Great English Short Stories (Contributor) 20 copies, 1 review
Science fiction through the ages 1 (Contributor, some editions) 13 copies
One Thousand Years of Laughter: An Anthology a Classic Comic Prose (Contributor, some editions) 7 copies, 2 reviews
Poetry anthology (Contributor, some editions) 6 copies
A voyage to Cacklogallinia, with a description of the religion, policy,… (attributed author, some editions) 6 copies, 1 review
De la conversation (Author, some editions) 5 copies
Piirakkasota : Valikoima huumoria (Contributor) 3 copies
Love & Marriage (Contributor) 2 copies
Bukcase I 2 copies

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Short biography
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".

Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier – or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.

His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed "Swiftian".
Disambiguation notice
Please be careful not to mistakenly combine full versions and abridged versions of Jonathan Swift's works.

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