A Modest Proposal For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick

Jonathan Swift

1667–1745

Best known for the wild imagination and sharp bite of Gulliver’s Travels, this Anglo-Irish writer turned satire into one of literature’s most powerful tools. His work can be funny, strange, and unsettling at once, always pushing readers to look harder at politics, power, and human folly.