English novelist, author of the notorious Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

After serving as a consul at Smyrna and later as an agent of the British East India Company in Bombay, Cleland became a penniless wanderer who drifted from place to place and was apparently confined several times in English debtors' prisons. In such reduced circumstances, he wrote Fanny Hill (1748–49) for a fee of 20 guineas. An elegant, flowery work of pornography describing the activities of a London prostitute, this novel has enjoyed enormous popularity for more than two centuries as a classic of erotic literature. When originally published, it was immediately suppressed (an action later repeated many times), and Cleland was called before the Privy Council. He pleaded his extreme poverty and was not sentenced. Instead, Lord Granville, thinking him talented, secured him a yearly pension of £100, that he might put his gifts to better use. Thereafter, he became a journalist, playwright, and amateur philologist.