Gulliver has an itch to travel around the world, but whenever he steps on a ship, bad luck seems to find him. He is shipwrecked, abandoned, marooned, and mutinied against, and each time lands in a strange and curious place. First he discovers the kingdom of the six-inch-tall Lilliputians, then the country of the giant Brobdingnagians, then the island of the academic Laputans, which floats in the sky, and finally the noble realm of the horselike Houyhnhnms....

"Lemuel Gulliver is a doctor who longs for adventure. But when he signs on board a sailing ship, he gets much more than he bargained for. A shipwreck leaves him swept ashore on a distant island inhabited by people no bigger than his finger, as astonished by his size as he is by theirs. But this is only the beginning of Gulliver's astonighing experiences. Before he returns home, he will have gone through some of the most amazing adventures ever,...

Leo Damrosch draws on discoveries made over the past thirty years to tell the story of Swift's life anew. Probing holes in the existing evidence, he takes seriously some daring speculations about Swift's parentage, love life, and various personal relationships and shows how Swift's public version of his life--the one accepted until recently--was deliberately misleading. Swift concealed aspects of himself and his relationships, and other people in...