Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift

This enduring classic tells of the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship's surgeon who becomes a castaway in strange and faraway lands. Shipwrecked upon the shores of Lilliput, he encounters the Lilliputians, whose petty wars and vanities are rendered ridiculous by their six-inch height. Further travels take Gulliver to Brobdingnag, a land of crude giants; to the floating island of Laputa, a land of intellectuals who are ignorant of practical life; and finally to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of wise and gentle horses served by degenerate human-like creatures. Gulliver's adventures among these various peoples offer him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Both an entertaining fantasy and a devastating satire of society, Gulliver's Travels is as witty and relevant in our own age of hypocrisy and irony as it was in Swift's eighteenth century.