Robinson Crusoe: The Original 1719 Unabridged and Complete Edition (A Daniel Defoe Classics)

Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer) – a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, roughly resembling Tobago, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been regarded as based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called “Más a Tierra” (now a part of Chile) which was once renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Despite its simple narrative style, Robinson Crusoe was once well received in the literary world and is continuously credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. It is in most cases seen as a contender for the first English novel. Before the end of 1719, the book had already run through four editions, and it has gone on to turn into probably the most widely published books in history, spawning such a lot of imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television, and radio, that its name is used to define a genre, the Robinsonade.