This program was originally broadcast. Jonathan Swift wrote “Gulliver’s Travels” and blistering satire on human nature. He’s relevant again. We’ll bring back Jonathan Swift.

Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, pictured in a 1710 portrait. (Charles Jervas / Creative Commons) Jonathan Swift could wield satire like maybe no one else in the history of the English language. He put Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians in “Gulliver’s Travels” and sent up the mean, absurd smallness of so much human nature. He put the bones of children in stewpots in “A Modest Proposal” and skewered human immorality. That essay, nearly 300 years old, still hurts to read today. “I hate and detest the animal called man,” Swift wrote. And what made him?

Download our free ePUB, PDF or MOBI eBooks to read on almost any device — your desktop, iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet. Gulliver's Travels. Nov 20, 2015 - Gulliver finds himself on an island of talking horse-people. It was September 1710. I'd set sail from Portsmouth, but. Download your app.

This hour On Point: a new biography shares the life and times and view of Jonathan Swift. D link 2740u firmware update. -- Tom Ashbrook Guests, professor of literature at Harvard University. Author of the new book,.' Also author of ' and '.'

From Tom's Reading List — 'Although basically a traditionalist, he was in many ways ahead of his time. Thus he was all for the learning and writing of women (who were then forbidden the university); he was active in promoting the cause of Ireland, though he hated it; and he advocated religious tolerance despite his own firm Anglicanism.

The contemporary medical stance to the contrary, he was a hearty practitioner of physical exercise, often traveling on foot or horseback rather than by the customary coach or sedan chair. He opposed slavery, which was generally — even by Daniel Defoe — approved of.'

— 'All Swift's satires were written in some invented first person – the clever economist with 'A Modest Proposal' to make the Irish eat their babies, the up‑to-date hack who narrates 'A Tale of a Tub,' gullible Gulliver, tumbling from pride to self-disgust; all were published anonymously. Swift is not 'there' in any of them. All the more reason for trying to find the author, whom none of us can quite detach from Gulliver in his final dark enlightenment, realising that he is but a Yahoo: sly, vicious and lecherous.' — 'Much of Damrosch’s book is devoted to Swift’s political affiliations. He started out as a Whig, but switched to the Tories after that party’s leader, Robert Harley, seeking a propagandist and pamphleteer for his cause, flattered him with compliments and personal attention. Soon the upstart Swift was hobnobbing with England’s ruling class — until the Whigs, under Robert Walpole, regained power. While these post-Restoration political shifts and betrayals were of seismic importance in British history, 21st-century American readers are likely to find them tedious.'

Read An Excerpt Of 'Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World' by Leo Damrosch.

• • • • Signature Burial place Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an, essayist, political (first for the, then for the ), poet and cleric who became of. Swift is remembered for works such as (1704), (1712), (1726), and (1729). He is regarded by the as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms – such as,, – or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the styles.