Adventure classics

The adventure novel is the oldest sort of prose story still read purely for pleasure, and the English line of it begins with two books that were not offered as entertainment at all. Robinson Crusoe (1719) was published as the true account of a shipwrecked sailor and was read as one. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) took the same voyage-narrative form in order to satirise everything Defoe’s readers believed about themselves. Between them they fixed the shape the genre kept: an ordinary man, a far place, and the account brought home.

A century and a half later Robert Louis Stevenson made the form deliberate. Treasure Island began as a map drawn to amuse a stepson on a wet holiday, and it settled what a pirate is for everyone since. Kidnapped is a chase across the Highlands built around a real murder. Melville sent a whaling ship after something considerably larger than a whale. Mark Twain put a boy and a runaway man on a raft and let the river carry the argument. Kipling wrote Kim, which is a spy novel, a road novel and a quarrel about India at the same time. Jack London, who had actually been to the Klondike, wrote a dog’s education there in seventy pages.

They are fast books, and unlike most fast books they have lasted, because the danger in them is never only physical. Several were written for young readers and not one of them is only for young readers.

Every title here is the complete text — no abridgement, no simplified vocabulary, nothing trimmed for length — set anew by Bibliomancer, free to read online in the Reader.