Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
Summary
A young Englishman goes to sea against his father's advice, survives storms and capture by pirates, prospers as a planter in Brazil, and then wrecks on an uninhabited island off the coast of Venezuela, the sole survivor. What follows is the most influential survival story ever written: twenty eight years of salvage, shelter building, goat herding, grain growing and ledger keeping, told in the flat, exact, inventory loving voice of a man of business accounting for his soul. Years in, he finds a single footprint in the sand, one of the most famous moments in fiction, and eventually saves a prisoner from cannibals on the day he names him for, Friday, who becomes his companion and servant. Rescue finally comes by way of an English ship taken by mutineers.
The pleasure of the book is procedural. Defoe understood that readers will happily watch competence at work, and the passages where Crusoe fails, his first canoe too heavy to move, batches of pots cracking in the fire, are as absorbing as the triumphs. The religious self examination that alternates with the carpentry can drag for modern readers, and the attitudes to Friday and to slavery are of their time and require a reader's honesty rather than excuses: Crusoe is a slave trader before the wreck, and the book knows no shame about it.
Published in April 1719 under a title that presented it as a true memoir written by Crusoe himself, it convinced many readers it was fact, and it went through four editions before the year was out.
Historical Context & Significance
The story's likely seed was Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish sailor marooned four years on a Pacific island until 1709, though Defoe neither confirmed nor denied the connection, and earlier castaways such as the Spanish sailor Pedro Serrano may have contributed. What Defoe made of the material is generally counted the beginning of realistic English fiction, and it spawned an entire genre, the Robinsonade, that runs from The Swiss Family Robinson to survival stories set on other planets.
Rousseau made it the one book his ideal pupil would read in childhood. Man Friday entered the language. And the book's second life is as a document of empire: James Joyce called Crusoe the true prototype of the British colonist, and modern readers find the whole colonial project in miniature on that island, which is exactly why it stays worth reading rather than merely famous.