He produced biographies, essays, plays, poetry, fictional letters, fables, short stories, and criticism.
[citation needed] Gildon was born in Gillingham, Dorset to a Roman Catholic family that had been active in support of the Royalist side during the English Civil War.
[citation needed] At the time, he was a social correspondent with John Dryden and William Wycherley, as well as Behn.
Writing as "Lindamour", Gildon prefaced this new collection with an invented letter "To the Honorable and Divine Hermione.
[10] In 1706, Gildon, a staunch Whig by then (in contrast to his family's Toryism and Jacobitism), published letters to the Electress Sophia to come visit England, with an eye toward being on hand to take the throne upon Queen Anne's death.
The letters were sufficient provocation to carry a prison term or the pillory, but Gildon's connections saved him.
Arthur Mainwaring, an enemy already of Jonathan Swift's, aided Gildon again, and Steele introduced him to other periodical work.
Gildon's "Logic" is an unattributed translation of a large part of Jean Le Clerc's Logica of 1692.
Gildon switched literary sides in Complete Art of Poetry, which he dedicated to the Duchess of Buckingham.
Gildon wrote two sheets of Mrs. Manley's life under the title of The History of Rivella, Author of the Atalantis, probably in a negative light.
Then Manley wrote her own version of history under strict time constraints and published it anonymously under the title The Adventures of Rivella (1714).
Gildon aspired to a courtly lifestyle; in 1703, Daniel Defoe attacked him as a rake who "keeps six Whores, and starves his modest Wife".
Defoe's title page reads "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: who lived eight and twenty Years all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself.
The same year, Robert Harley (patron and friend to Swift and Pope, earlier) gave him a 100-pound annuity as a "Royal Bounty."