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Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures.(Review)

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From: New Criterion
Date: 19981001
Author:Silver, Daniel J.

Boswell records that Samuel Johnson had read Daniel Defoe and "allowed a considerable share of merit to a man, who, bred a tradesman, had written so variously and so well." The comment points to a truth about Defoe: a Protestant through and through, he had an amazingly catholic mind. It is, indeed, hard to think of another writer of imaginative literature who, in his journalism and pamphleteering, took on such an extraordinary range of subjects: finance, trade, religion, politics, travel, medicine, science, architecture, farming, horticulture, morals, and manners, among others.

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