Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift

Apr 2013 · Sold by Harper Collins

About this eBook

Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726, is Jonathan Swift’s best known full-length work, and is both a parody of the “travellers’ tales” popular at the time and a satire on human nature. Throughout the four stories, ship’s surgeon Gulliver travels to distant lands, meets strange new peoples like the diminutive Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdingnags, defends his ship from a pirate attack, and is marooned on a deserted island.

The popularity of Gulliver’s Travels has endured since its original publication, and Swift’s unique terminology has found its way into common language with such expressions as “lilliputian,” “yahoo,” and the computer terms “big-endian” and “little-endian.”

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About the author

Born in 1667, Jonathan Swift was an Irish writer and cleric, best known for his works Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Journal to Stella, amongst many others. Educated at Trinity College in Dublin, Swift received his Doctor of Divinity in February 1702, and eventually became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Publishing under the names of Lemeul Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, and M. B. Drapier, Swift was a prolific writer who, in addition to his prose works, composed poetry, essays, and political pamphlets for both the Whigs and the Tories, and is considered to be one of the foremost English-language satirists, mastering both the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. Swift died in 1745, leaving the bulk of his fortune to found St. Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, a hospital for the mentally ill, which continues to operate as a psychiatric hospital today.