Novel
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe · 1719
Opening lines
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A merchant's son leaves home against his father's advice to go to sea. He is captured by corsairs, escapes, settles as a planter in Brazil, sets out again to fetch slaves from Africa, and is shipwrecked. The sole survivor, he reaches an island where he finds no one. He salvages what he can from the wreck, keeps a journal as long as he has ink, and learns to bake bread and make pots. One day, after many years, he sees the print of a bare foot in the sand.
Context
The book appeared on 25 April 1719 without an author's name: the title page presented it as the autobiography of a mariner, written by himself, and some readers took it for a true account. The same year, a hostile pamphleteer parodied this title, pointing, thinly veiled, to the man hiding behind it; no edition bore the author's name in his lifetime. The starting point is the case of a Scottish sailor put ashore at his own request on an island in the Pacific and taken off again more than four years later; the island of the book lies elsewhere, near the mouth of the Orinoco.
Who it is for
A long novel, in the first person, with a detailed account of material tasks, which the narrator keeps for a time in the form of a diary.
Prizes and reception
It gave its name to an entire genre, and the island where the sailor who inspired it lived was renamed after its hero in 1966.
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