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Richard Gunderman, Indiana University
(THE CONVERSATION) He survived the last great plague in London and the city's Great Fire. He was imprisoned and persecuted for his religious and political views. There was no happy ending for the journalist Daniel Defoe, author of "A Journal of a Plague Year." When he died in 1731, he was mired in debt and hiding from his creditors.
Yet Defoe, born in 1660, left behind a work of fiction that is one of the most widely published books in history...
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