Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660 to a family of Presbyterian Dissenters, and educated at a dissenting academy in Newington Green. He became a merchant, dealing in different commodities including hosiery. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley (1665-1732); six of their eight children lived into adulthood.During his lifetime Daniel Defoe produced, at a conservative estimate, 318 publications in many formats and on an extraordinary range of topics. Perhaps best known today as the author of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe is considered to have fundamentally shaped the novel as an emerging genre of English literature.