Davis spent his life primarily as a journalist and novelist, but he was also an urban pioneer (or a proto-gentrifier, if you look at it from another angle).

FORBES: The Meaningful L.J. Davis

The book reads like first-person reportage, and Defoe was a journalist as well as a novelist, but the book is set in 1665, when Defoe was only five years old.

WSJ: Dear Book Lover: Fiction that Reads Like Nonfiction