Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography:  The life of satirist Jonathan Swift, written by a master biographer and leading scholar of eighteenth-century literature

Superb. . . . Damroschs outstanding book has raised Swifts provocative genius to life.Jeffrey Collins, Wall Street Journal
 
Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gullivers Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
 
In this deeply researched biography, Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swifts life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swifts parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swifts public version of his lifethe one accepted until recentlywas deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in his life helped to keep his secrets.
 
Assembling suggestive clues, Damrosch re-narrates the events of Swifts life while making vivid the sights, sounds, and smells of his English and Irish surroundings.Through his own words and those of a wide circle of friends, a complex Swift emerges: a restless, combative, empathetic figure, a man of biting wit and powerful mind, and a major figure in the history of world letters. See more