1644–1718 · English Quaker writer and founder of Pennsylvania
William Penn was an English Quaker who was jailed repeatedly for his beliefs — including a stretch in the Tower of London in 1668–69 — and who went on to found the colony of Pennsylvania. He is remembered chiefly as a colonist and advocate of religious toleration, but his most durable piece of writing is a small, unshowy book of aphorisms: Some Fruits of Solitude (licensed 1693) and its sequel More Fruits of Solitude (1718). Edmund Gosse, introducing a 1903 reprint, argued the maxims came out of the years when Penn was out of favour and in hiding after the fall of James II — the enforced leisure Penn thanks God for in the book itself.