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The Life and Works of John Dryden
John Dryden was considered the most influential man of literature in the second half of the 17th century. He was the first of the great English neo-classical poets. He was well known for his poems, drama, and criticism. He called himself Neander, the "new man," in his essay Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and implied that he was spokesman for the concerns of his generation and the embodiment of its tastes (King 189).
Dryden was born in 1631 to a Puritan family in Aldwinkle All Saints, Northamptonshire. He was the oldest of fourteen children. His family was not rich, but they managed to scrape enough money together to send him to school at Westminster and at the University of Cambridge, where he received a B.A. degree in 1654. In 1657, he went to London and briefly served Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's government in a minor position (Sherburn 711). He wrote an elegy on the death of Cromwell called Heroic Stanzas. He then turned right......

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