Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant who lived from 1608 to 1674. He wrote the 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost and served as Secretary for Foreign Tongues for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
Paradise Lost is a blank-verse epic in twelve books addressing the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton composed it between 1658 and 1664 while blind and impoverished, dictating it to a series of aides.
Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644 as a speech to the Parliament of England attacking pre-printing censorship, prompted by the hostile response to his earlier divorce tracts. In it he called for the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton had become totally blind by 1652. The cause is debated, but bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma are considered most likely, and his blindness forced him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses, one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell.
Milton sold the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for five pounds on the 27th of April 1667, with a further five pounds to be paid if and when each print run sold out. The first quarto edition was priced at three shillings per copy and sold out in eighteen months.
Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton went into hiding, fearing for his life, while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings were burnt. He re-emerged after a general pardon, was briefly imprisoned, and was freed when influential friends including Andrew Marvell intervened.