Biography Essay

Tobias Smollett has always been recognized as one of the truly great English novelists of the eighteenth century, the period during which the novel as it is known today emerged and was established as a significant new form of literary expression. But Smollett and his achievement—five ambitious and popular works of fiction published within a span of twenty-four years—have also been overshadowed by his most celebrated contemporaries and their masterpieces of storytelling. Robinson Crusoe (1719), Clarissa (1747-1748), Tom Jones (1749), and Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) have all enjoyed, almost without interruption, both critical acclaim and a devoted audience from the moment of their initial appearance in print; and Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne have been praised by important members of every generation since their own as men of huge talent, admirable accomplishment, and broad appeal to a variety of intelligent readers...