The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
20 chapters
3.68from 338,381 ratingson Goodreads
Against his father's advice, a young man goes to sea and is eventually wrecked on an uninhabited island with nothing but what he can salvage. He is there twenty-eight years. He builds, plants, counts the days, argues with God and keeps an inventory — and then finds a single footprint in the sand.
About the book
Published in 1719 and presented as a true memoir, Robinson Crusoe is the story of a young man from York who goes to sea against his father’s advice, is enslaved by corsairs, escapes, prospers in Brazil, and is then wrecked on an uninhabited island off the Orinoco on a voyage to buy slaves. He is there twenty-eight years. He salvages the ship before it breaks up, builds, fences, plants barley, tames goats, keeps a calendar by notching a post, and works through his own conversion in a journal. Defoe wrote it at nearly sixty, in the voice of a practical man keeping accounts, and it is the accounting that made it new: the inventory, the labour, the slow accumulation. The single footprint in the sand is the most famous shock in English fiction, and the arrival of Friday turns the book into something else — a study of mastery that has been argued over ever since.
Characters
Robinson Crusoe — Narrator
A restless York merchant’s son, wrecked alone and left to build a life out of salvage and habit.
Friday — Companion
A young man Crusoe saves from captives about to be killed, and immediately teaches to call him master.
Xury — Boy
The boy who escapes slavery in Morocco with Crusoe, and whom Crusoe then sells to a Portuguese captain.
The Portuguese captain — Benefactor
The one entirely honest man in the book, who rescues Crusoe and later keeps his Brazilian accounts intact.
Friday’s father — Rescued captive
An old man saved from the same fate as his son, and reunited with him on the island.
The English captain — Mutiny victim
Put ashore by his own mutinous crew, and restored to his ship by Crusoe in exchange for passage home.
About the author
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was an English merchant, pamphleteer and government agent who came to fiction in his late fifties, after bankruptcy and a spell in the pillory for a satirical pamphlet the authorities failed to read as satire. He wrote Robinson Crusoe as though it were a true account by a real sailor, and published it without his own name on it — a habit of a career spent producing hundreds of pamphlets, many of them under invented identities and some on both sides of the same argument. His other books include Moll Flanders, Roxana and A Journal of the Plague Year.