Jonathan Swift
Irish satirist and Anglican cleric who created the island of Lilliput in his novel Gulliver's Travels Show bio
Bio
Jonathan Swift lost his father seven months before he was born. He learned at Trinity College Dublin to argue both sides of any question.
Swift travelled widely in Ireland and Britain, sharpening his sense of human nature and society. He poured that understanding into satire, most famously in Gulliver's Travels. Swift published everything under pen names like Lemuel Gulliver, or with no name at all.
He may have escaped persecution thanks to those pen names, some scholars suggest. Swift made deadpan irony so much his own that such satire is now called "Swiftian."