April 24, 1731

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660 to April 24, 1731), was an English writer, of a type that may have been quite new in the late 17th century. He wrote, a lot, about many things, but for him writing was just part of a spectrum of an activity: there was not the modern split between thinking and doing, and Defoe dashed at both. The author of Robinson Crusoe, (1719) for instance, also had a farm raising civet cats for the perfume business. 

This last detail is discussed in Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Maximillian E. Novak, 2003). The blurb for this book says:

'Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century.'

You might say that Defoe was an early modern, but I don't think so. He may have been the last medieval genius, (though lacking, perhaps not needing, a religious boundary). I say this because the novel, a new form, was not yet indicative of a separate, imaginary, realm.