Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures

by Richard West

A provocative and vibrant glimpse into the life of the mysterious literary master who created such renowned classics as Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe presents the many facets of the writer--including spy, rebel, journalist, prison convict, husband, and father.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, British Literature

446 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Richard West was a British journalist and author best known for his reporting of the Vietnam War and Yugoslavia.

Born in London, West attended Marlborough College before his national service spell in Trieste awakened a lifelong interest in Yugoslavia.

Starting off his journalistic career at the Manchester Guardian, West became a foreign correspondent in Yugoslavia, Africa, Central America and Indochina. Described by Neal Ascherson as the "paragon of the independent journalist for his generation", he would spend much of the next two decades in Vietnam, Africa and eastern Europe, where he was codenamned Agent Friday by Communist Poland's secret police. Among his books are The Making of the Prime Minister (with Anthony Howard),[4] An English Journey (1981) and Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1995). Along with Patrick Marnham and Auberon Waugh, West was one of three signatories to a letter to The Times that called for a British monument to honour those repatriated as a result of the Yalta Conference; it was eventually erected in 1986.

Reviews

[Deedee · Rating 3 out of 5]

History of England by George Macaulay Trevelyan is frequently quoted in this autobiography.

Overall, it reads as if the author Mr. West was an elderly man, very British, sipping his tea in the afternoon and telling the listener(s) about Mr. Defoe and about the state of England during the years of Mr. Defoe's life.

[Nick Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is many years since I read Defoe, and while I remember Journal of the Plague Year fondly as well as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, I remember also how hard I found it to pin down Defoe’s point of view. I was never sure what was real, and what was ironic.

This life showed me how little I knew of Defoe’s life, of his political pamphleteering for the Whigs, of his participation in the Monmouth’s doomed rebellion, of his struggles in business, imprisonment for debt. He spent much of his life fleeing creditors, and he wrote prolifically to raise money. The life shows him primarily as a journalist, and that accounts for what I couldn’t place when reading him as a novelist.

West also stresses the importance of Defoe’s religious non-conformism. We struggle today to feel how that piety underlay everything he wrote. That is made even more confusing by Defoe being completely comfortable with and approving of the slave trade. Crusoe is on a slaving trip when he is shipwrecked, and at no point is it suggested this is a judgement..

[Matt Kelland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure I would describe Defoe's life as particularly strange, or even an adventure. Surprising, maybe, depending on what you know about him. He spent most of his life as an unsuccessful businessman, bankrupted several times, and a political hack, pro-slavery religious bigot, and political toady. Most of his work was snarky, sarcastic jibes at people he disliked, combined with fawning praise for people who gave him money. Much of his so-called journalism was simply made up from his imagination, and he only started writing the fiction for which he is famous late in life while hiding from his many creditors.
It seems very little is known about Defoe himself, so half the book is just synopses of his writing. At least I don't have to read them now.

[Zandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

The second biography of Defoe I have read and I am still waiting for a good one. I am not sure why West has reproduced large passages of Trevelyan and Macauley when they wrote so long ago, and only about the general times of Defoe, not about the man himself. I also can't understand why West felt it was good to have six penultimate chapters devoted to detailed yet simple summaries of the story-lines of Defoe's books. This book is fine, if you skip over vast tracts of it.

[Alex Stephenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informational in the context it provides, nauseatingly dull in the parts where West just describes the plots of every single Defoe novel in what feels like a clear attempt to hit a word count. Only for fans, and even then, you're free to skim.

[E Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inadequate "biography" of the enigmatic life of Daniel Defoe. The scarce evidence available means three quarters of the book is dedicated to the political situation at the time and then offers tiresome descriptions of Defoe's novels! Defoe carefully guarded the details of his own life due to being hounded by creditors, libel writs and religious persecutors. He was also a secret agent for a while, which isn't exactly something you put on your CV. I got the impression the author (who was a journalist) ran out of information very quickly and tried to fill in the blanks with at times incorrect historical detail. A very disappointing read which provides very little insight.

[Gabriel]

Hemingway advised only the tips of icebergs. Here, we have the tips, the icebergs, the seas they float in, the boats that crash into them, and a bit about the English monarchy. If you have any interest in the life of Daniel Defoe, it will be crushed by this ponderous, prosaic, unending biography.

Like historical minutiae? Consider philately! Like your biography to be 99% history, 1% biography? Reconsider!

[LULU lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very amazing. The character in this book gave me a shock, because this book character family has a good condition, but he still chose to the dangerous work-sailing and then stated this sailing trip, The brave character survive on a desert island for 28 years, two months and nine days, he has left great deeds on this island.
And make me think everything is possible, sometimes when you feel like something you cannot do it, but you can have a try.

[Ralph Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Defoe was fascinating. Unfortunately, this book is dense with the political history of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution, for which D. was an important pamphleteer and political apparatchik. Gets tedious after a while. I had to give up.

[Bruce MacBain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a good biography except for the lack of footnotes!