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.