Daniel Defoe is standing in the pillory while soldiers have to restrain crowds from throwing flowers at him. Wood engraving.

Daniel Defoe (1661-1731). An English writer who is best known as a novelist and the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and several other fictional autobiographies. Defoe's contemporaries did not know him as a novelist, as all his texts were anonymous, and most were not attributed to him until several decades after his death. Like his parents, he was a Protestant Dissenter, and he first became known as a writer for his "Shortest way with dissenters" (1703), a satirical defence of his co-eligionists, for the writing of which he was placed in the pillory