Paula R. Backsheider is Professor of English at the University of Rochester, where she has taught since 1975. Her biography, Daniel Defoe: His Life, won the 1990 British Council Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities. She is also the author of Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation; A Being More Intense: The Prose Works of Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe; and Moll Flanders: The Making of a Criminal Mind. She has written and edited other books and a number of articles on Defoe and eighteenth-century literature.