A prolific poet, satirist, and political pamphleteer, Swift began his career in satirical fiction with A Tale of a Tub (1704). His most famous work is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships (1726). A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick (1729) is his best remembered non-fiction satire. He collaborated with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele on the Tatler, publishing essays both there and independently in the character of "Isaac Bickerstaff," a penname he sometimes shared with his collaborators. Swift's Examiner, which he operated from 1710 to 1714, is one of the three or four most important early eighteenth-century essay periodicals, a genre best exemplified by Addison's Spectator. Referring to his Dublin origins and his later status as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he is sometimes called "the Irish dean."

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