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A rich and riveting portrait of the man behind Gulliver's Travels, by a "vivid, ardent, and engaging" author (New York Times Book Review) .Jonathan Swift's world-famous books -- from Gulliver's Travels to A Modest Proposal -- are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. Half-orphaned, a Dubliner by birth, but a man who would always insist he was English, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a figure of great contradictions. An essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and cleric who became dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Swift satirized the powerful but aspired to political greatness, mocked men's vanity but held himself in high esteem, and was a religious moralizer famed for his malice -- a man sharply aware of humanity's flaws, but no less susceptible to them.