Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman born in Dublin who spent his young manhood in England as secretary to Sir William Temple and his maturity as a political pamphleteer, first for the Whigs and then, with devastating effect, for the Tories. Made dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin in 1713, he wrote there the works that made him Ireland's champion and the greatest satirist in English: the Drapier's Letters, Gulliver's Travels in 1726 and A Modest Proposal in 1729. His long attachment to Esther Johnson, his Stella, is recorded in his journal to her. He left his fortune to found a hospital for the insane.