Daniel Defoe was an English trader, writer, pamphleteer and journalist. He is most famous for his novel "Robinson Crusoe", which is second only to the Bible in its number of translations. Memoirs of a Cavalier is a work of historical fiction, set during the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil Wars. Daniel Defoe's great talent as a writer was to speak in the voices of others. Such was the authenticity of this memoir of a 17th-century soldier of fortune that for over half a century it was considered to be genuine.