Lord George Gordon Byron was a British Romantic poet whose life, celebrity, politics, scandals, and literary brilliance made him one of the most famous writers of the nineteenth century. Born in 1788, Byron became an international literary figure with Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, whose melancholy, restless, self-dramatising hero helped create the image now known as the Byronic figure. His poetry combined aristocratic confidence, political scepticism, sexual candour, wit, melancholy, and defiance in a way that made him both admired and notorious.Byron's major works include Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Manfred, The Giaour, The Corsair, Beppo, and Don Juan. Of these, Don Juan is often regarded as his greatest and most original achievement: a vast satirical poem that uses comic narrative, digression, social observation, and verbal brilliance to mock hypocrisy, war, empire, sexual morality, literary fashion, and political pretence. Britannica identifies Don Juan as Byron's masterpiece among his later long poems.In 1816 Byron left England permanently amid debt, scandal, and public controversy, living thereafter in Switzerland and Italy before becoming involved in the Greek struggle for independence. He died at Missolonghi in 1824 at the age of thirty-six. His reputation has never depended on respectability; it rests instead on the force of his style, the glamour and danger of his public image, and the enduring power of poems that refuse pious comfort. Byron remains one of the central figures of Romantic literature and one of the great satiric voices in English poetry.