Henry Fielding

Fielding trained as a barrister but made his name first as a playwright, writing sharp political satires for the London stage through the 1730s, until his mockery of Robert Walpole's government helped provoke the Licensing Act of 1737, which imposed censorship and effectively closed his theatrical career overnight.

He turned to fiction almost as a stopgap: Shamela (1741) mocked Richardson's Pamela outright, and Joseph Andrews grew from the same joke into something larger. Called to the bar, he later became a London magistrate, and with his half-brother John founded the Bow Street Runners, one of England's first organized police forces, while writing Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia in his spare hours.

Failing health sent him to Lisbon in 1754 seeking a cure; he died there within months, and his account of the voyage was published after his death.