He was born in Ireland and became a priest. He was one ot the greatest writer of Augustan Age. He took sides with the ancients against modern writers in an imaginary battle of books. He defended the cause of Irish poor (especially in his pamphlet A Modest Proposal, 1729) and wrote satires against political corruption. In Gulliver's Travels (1726), his most famous and successful work, he mixes utopian fiction with realism.
Gulliver's Travels is a novel in four books. It can be read as a travel story, a popular genre at the time. Lemuel Gulliver, the narrator and protagonist, is an ordinary man, who makes a series of voyages into remote regions of the world. His imaginary places and creatures seem real because they are desribed in very detailed way. He mixes the fantastic and the real: his imaginary lands are all placed in known oceans or continents.
The book can be read also as a great satire to submit civilized society to a complete criticism. This book belongs to the tradition of utopian narratives.
In the first book the very small Lilliputians live a world very similar to that of Gulliver with their cruelty and thirst for power.
In the second book proportions are reversed. Gulliver meets wise and good giants, he is considered like a toy and they consider Gulliver's civilization as barbarous.
In the third book there is the voyage to Laputa, a more direct satire of contemporary England. Swift satirizes modern philosophies and science, and their inability to solve all human problems;
In the last voyage, in the fourth book, Gulliver is in the reign of wise and super intelligent speaking horses that have under them creatures very similar to primordial men, the Yahoos. Gulliver, a confused ordinary man, is caught in the middle; when the story ends, he no longer knows to which world he belongs.
In the end Gulliver alienates himself from the other men because he is disgusted by them. Gulliver's Travels is a controversial book. The novel has been considered a children’s story and a philosophical tale, a book full of mysterious allusions.
Swift's is the first work of fiction, together with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, to make modern use of what we now call ‘first-person narrator’, the voice that tells the story.
The reader has the impression of listening to a first-hand account of things, to a confession and so feel emotionally involved.