Irish · b. 1667
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and cleric, the greatest prose satirist in the English language, author of Gulliver's Travels and 'A Modest Proposal.'
Jonathan Swift was a clergyman and political writer in Ireland and England whose savage wit and moral indignation made him the supreme satirist of his age.
His masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), disguises a ferocious satire of human nature, politics, and pride beneath the surface of a fantastical travel adventure, and has endured both as children’s story and as biting commentary. His essay “A Modest Proposal,” ironically suggesting the Irish poor sell their children as food, remains the most famous satirical essay ever written.
Swift is celebrated as a master of irony and satire whose mordant vision of human folly retains all its force three centuries on.
by Jonathan Swift
Lemuel Gulliver travels to four extraordinary lands — Lilliput (tiny people), Brobdingnag (giants), Laputa (flying island of abstracted philosophers), and the country of the Houyhnhnms (rational horses served by bestial humans). Each voyage is a systematic satirical assault on something Swift found contemptible in early eighteenth-century Europe.
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