Daniel Defoe (c.1659 -1731) was a fiction writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy. He was one of the first authors to write a novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural. Defoe gives his reader a classic, moralistic tale of the crimes and misfortunes of Moll Flanders who was five times a wife, twelve years a thief, and a harlot who grew rich but died a penitent. Moll goes from prostitution in the streets of London to prosperity on a Virginia plantation