Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal
The fiercest satirist in the English language. Gulliver's Travels reads as children's adventure and as savage indictment of humanity. A Modest Proposal — suggesting the Irish eat their children — remains the most devastating exercise in ironic argument ever written.
Key works
- Gulliver's Travels1726— Adventure story and misanthropic masterpiece
- A Modest Proposal1729— Irony as moral weapon — eat the babies