title: A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works (Dover Thrift Editions)
author:  Jonathan Swift 
description: If you read this in high school (as many of us did), it may have shocked you--not bad for a tract written in 1729. It wouldn't be fair to those of you who haven't come across <i>A Modest Proposal</i> to reveal the particulars of the piece; suffice it to say that <i>Saturday Night Live</i> has nothing on Jonathan Swift! Swift's discussion of what Great Britain should do for his native impoverished Ireland is a model of political satire, absolutely consistent in tone and even now still sparkling in its clarity. The balance between, on the one hand, the utter seriousness of the matter in question and, on the other, the outrageousness of the remedy suggested is exquisite. <i>A Modest Proposal</i> is short and comes bound in this edition with several of Swift's other writings. This volume is an excellent introduction to the author of <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679601880/${0}"><i>Gulliver's Travels</i></a> (itself a masterwork) and to one of the world's premier satirical minds. What are you waiting for? <i>--Michael Gerber</i>
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  oxford world’ s classics
  
  
  GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
  
  
  Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was born in Dublin, where he was educated at
  Trinity College, and in 1713 became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral. While
  previously living in London, he had made friends with Pope, Gay, and
  Arbuthnot, formed with them the Scriblerus Club, and written propaganda for
  the Tory administration of another club member, Robert Harley. He had first
  made his mark as a satirist with _A Tale of a Tub_ and _The Battle of the
  Books_ (1704), and after his return to Dublin (1714) he used his genius for
  polemical satire to defend Ireland (i.e. Anglo-Irish Protestants) against
  exploitation by the English Whigs, most sensationally in _A Modest Proposal_
  (1729). _Gulliver’s Travels_ is also a powerful political satire. Written when
  Swift was nearly 60, and first published in 1726, it at once became, quite
  literally, one of the world’s classics.
  
  
  Claude Rawson is the Maynard Mack Professor of En