Maximillian E. Novak (1930- ) is a UCLA Distinguished Professor Emeritus specializing in the works of Daniel Defoe, an 18th century trader, novelist, and pamphleteer most well-known for writing Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain. Novak obtained both his undergraduate degree and doctorate at UCLA, the latter obtained in 1958. He briefly taught at the University of Michigan before returning to UCLA. He has produced numerous essays and books on the philosophical, political, cultural, and economic underpinnings of Defoe’s writings and has serve as general editor for the Augustan Reprint series and the Stoke Newington Defoe series. Included among his works on Defoe are three monographs titled Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962), Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963), and Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction (1983). In 2001, Novak also produced the biographical work Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. In becoming one of the most renowned scholars of Defoe in the world, Novak has also contributed to studies of other early modern writers such as John Dryden, William Wycherly, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve.

The idea for creating a series of critical, scholarly editions for lesser known works within the Defoe canon was conceived by Maximillian Novak and Manuel Schonhorn in as early as 1968, but a combination of funding issues and other attending priorities delayed the actual publication of the works. In 1999, the first volume in the Stoke Newington Defoe Edition Series was published through New York’s AMS Press (also the publisher of The Eighteenth Century Current Bibliography), featuring a textual study of Defoe’s 1697 work An Essay Upon Projects. The series has received contributions from scholars such as Joyce Deveau Kennedy, Michael Seidel, Irving Rothman, Jim Springer Borck, Kit Kincade, and John G. Peters.