Jonathan Swift

Swift was born in Dublin after his father's death and raised by an uncle, educated at Trinity College Dublin and, when political unrest closed the university, at Oxford. He spent years as secretary to the diplomat Sir William Temple at Moor Park in England, where he tutored and grew close to a young Esther Johnson, whom he addressed for the rest of his life in coded letters as 'Stella.'

Ordained an Anglican priest, he became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and turned his pen against English rule over Ireland, most savagely in A Modest Proposal (1729), which coolly recommends eating Irish infants to solve the colony's poverty. Gulliver's Travels appeared anonymously in 1726 to instant, scandalized success. In old age he suffered from what was likely Ménière's disease, causing vertigo, deafness, and cognitive decline; he died in 1745, leaving his fortune to found a hospital for the mentally ill in Dublin.