Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731) was an English writer, merchant and political pamphleteer who was pilloried and imprisoned for satirising the Church before turning, in his late fifties, to the long prose fiction that made his name. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was followed by Moll Flanders, Roxana and A Journal of the Plague Year. His habit of presenting invented narratives as authentic memoirs did much to establish the English novel's realist manner.