Gulliver's Travels

Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon with a talent for ending up shipwrecked in places no map records. He tells his story as a plain, sober account, and over four voyages he meets four very different societies.

First comes Lilliput, where the court is six inches tall and goes to war over which end of an egg should be cracked. Then Brobdingnag, where a giant queen keeps him as a curiosity and English politics begins to look small when he describes it to the king. The third voyage takes him to the floating island of Laputa and to the ruined academies on the ground beneath it.

The last voyage leads to the land of the Houyhnhnms, horses who reason and behave with such decency that Gulliver can no longer stand the company of other humans.

The book was first published in 1726 under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Swift built it as a parody of the travel narratives that were popular in his day, and the narrator's deadpan reports of marvels are what give the satire its edge.

It reads as an episodic adventure, funny on the surface and sharper underneath. Beneath the wonders, it keeps questioning pride, faction, empire and the high opinion that reasoning creatures hold of themselves.