Swift would grow up to become the English-speaking world's foremost satirist, skewering politics, science, and human vanity through works like Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal. His acid wit and moral outrage at British policy toward Ireland made him both celebrated and feared.
Born to an English family in Dublin seven months after his father's death, Jonathan Swift's early life was marked by instability—shuttled between relatives, dependent on an uncle's charity for his education at Kilkenny College and Trinity College Dublin.
He would go on to become secretary to the statesman William Temple, be ordained in the Church of Ireland, and eventually rise to Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral. But it was his pen that made him immortal: Gulliver's Travels (1726) used fantastical voyages to lampoon European society, science, and politics with such precision that it remains in print three centuries later.
Swift's fury at England's economic strangulation of Ireland produced his most savage work, A Modest Proposal (1729), which coolly suggested the Irish poor sell their children as food for the rich—a satire so deadpan that some readers initially missed the irony entirely.
Key people: Jonathan Swift