Fiction · 1719
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Cast away alone on an island off the mouth of the Orinoco, a Yorkshire mariner keeps himself alive, and sane, for twenty-eight years by work, ingenuity and a journal — until a footprint in the sand. Daniel Defoe published the book in 1719, when he was nearly sixty, under the name of its narrator; it is commonly called the first English novel.
Most of it is work. Crusoe counts, salvages, plants, builds and keeps accounts, and the reader is given the inventory of the wreck and the yield of the barley because that is the substance of the thing. What follows the footprint turns a book about solitude into a book about property, mastery and conversion — which is where later readers have quarrelled with it.
This volume gives the first part complete, in its twenty chapters; the two continuations Defoe published afterwards are separate books.
Contents
- Chapter I — Start in Life
- Chapter II — Slavery and Escape
- Chapter III — Wrecked on a Desert Island
- Chapter IV — First Weeks on the Island
- Chapter V — Builds a House—The Journal
- Chapter VI — Ill and Conscience-Stricken
- Chapter VII — Agricultural Experience
- Chapter VIII — Surveys His Position
- Chapter IX — A Boat
- Chapter X — Tames Goats
- Chapter XI — Finds Print of Man’s Foot on the Sand
- Chapter XII — A Cave Retreat
- Chapter XIII — Wreck of a Spanish Ship
- Chapter XIV — A Dream Realised
- Chapter XV — Friday’s Education
- Chapter XVI — Rescue of Prisoners from Cannibals
- Chapter XVII — Visit of Mutineers
- Chapter XVIII — The Ship Recovered
- Chapter XIX — Return to England
- Chapter XX — Fight Between Friday and a Bear
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of Adventure.
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About the author
1661–1731 · Enlightenment
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was born in London, the son of a tallow chandler, and was in turn a merchant, a bankrupt, a pamphleteer pilloried for satire, a government agent, and one of the first journalists. He was nearly sixty when he published Robinson Crusoe (1719); Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Roxana followed in quick succession.
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