Born in Dublin to English parents, Swift divided his life between that city and London and between the acrimonious politics of the time and the affairs of the Anglican Church in Ireland. He was a prolific author of political pamphlets, satires and occasional verses but most of these appeared anonymously and the only work for which he was paid was the one which posterity has most admired - Gulliver's Travels. Often treated as a tale for children (and expurgated to make it more palatable as such), the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver provide a satirical view not just of the political and religious controversies of Swift's day but of the overweening pretensions of humankind through the ages. Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, is shipwrecked on Lilliput, an island where the inhabitants are only a few inches high. The Lilliputians are engaged in a war with a neighboring island, Blefuscu, and Gulliver, potentially a giant weapon of mass destruction in this miniature world, is dragged unwillingly into it. When he refuses to assist in the complete subjugation of Blefuscu, the Lilliputians turn against him and it is only with the help of the Blefuscudans that he is able to escape home. The Lilliputians are what most people remember of Gulliver's Travels but they appear only in the first part of the book. In the rest of the book, Gulliver encounters other lands and other peoples, from the giant Brobdingnagians to the Houyhnhnms, equine philosophers who confirm Gulliver in his misanthropy and his horrified realization that he and his kind are little more than Yahoos, the filthy creatures over whom the Houyhnhnms have dominion. It is surprising that Gulliver's Travels won its place as a children's classic because it is an often bitter book, filled with Swift's caustic contempt for human vice and weakness. It remains, long after the particular political and religious disputes which provoked it have faded into history, the most biting and memorable of all English satires.

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