Jonathan Swift is best known as a satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels (1726). He was born in Dublin in 1667, the son of an Englishman who settled in Ireland and died before his son was born. 
He gained a degree from Trinity College but fled to the safety of Protestant England to escape the disorders in Dublin. He stayed with a distant relative at Moor Park, Surrey and remained for many years, writing a number of poems before finding his talent for prose satire. Swift was ordained an Anglican priest in 1695 and took up various posts in the Irish church. He regularly visited London where he was acclaimed for his essays and pamphlets. His distrust for Nonconformists led him to work in favour of the Tory (High Anglican, pro-monarchy) government though he believed that power rested in the people, not in a Divine Right of Kings. In 1713, Swift was appointed Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and with the fall of the Tories, he returned to Ireland and eventually began writing verses and pamphlets again. He was a popular Dean but suffered from Ménière’s disease (an affliction of the semicircular canals of the ears) and was rumoured to have become insane. He suffered a stroke in 1739 followed by years of ill health before dying in 1745.
Swift’s works include A Tale of a Tub (1704), which is a satire against the corruptions and disagreements between the three branches of Christianity. The second part is the mock-heroic Battle of the Books in support of the ancients in a familiar dispute about the comparative qualities of ancient versus modern literature and culture. A Tale of a Tub is exceptional for its vigorous wit and stylistic competence. Swift regarded pedantry as a threat to literature, just as he saw Catholicism and Nonconformism as threats to the Anglican Church.
Swift’s essay “Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome,” contends that the English constitutional balance of power between the monarchy and the two houses of Parliament acts as a protection against tyranny. His Irish pamphlets including Drapier's Letters confront Ireland’s social and economic problems with factual presentation as well as humour and irony. Swift blamed the English government whilst suggesting ways for the Irish to improve their fortune. In A Modest Proposal, he bleakly and ironically advises that Ireland's poverty and overpopulation could be lightened if Irish parents sold their babies to the rich as foodstuffs. Swift's ideologies were characteristic of 18th-century rationalism, which emphasised morality and common sense, and distrusted emotionalism. His tone is humorous and savage, powerful and direct. His views are stated through irony, creating imagined characters to reflect the mentalities he attacks. This reflects his belief in humanity’s tension between its own brutishness and rationality.