The Author of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ Used Almost 200 Pseudonyms
Daniel Defoe honed his pen on political writing before he came to the novel
By Kat Eschner
smithsonian.com
July 31, 2017 10:30AM
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“That horrid place! My very blood chills at the mention of its name,” Moll Flanders, heroine of a novel of the same name, declares of Newgate prison. In fact, its author Daniel Defoe was writing from experience.
Defoe (whose real name was originally ‘Daniel Foe’) “holds the record of using 198 pseudonyms,” writes scholar Jared C. Calaway. In fact, he only started publishing fiction under his own slightly altered name late in life: he was almost 60 when The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was published, writes History.com. Defoe honed the writing skills that make Robinson Crusoe endure by writing political pamphlets. He sometimes paid for the privilege of voicing his views–as on this day in 1703, more than 15 years before writing his best-remembered novel, when he was put in the pillory for seditious libel.
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