Robinson Crusoe

Against his father’s advice to keep to the safe “middle station of life,” a restless young man from York goes to sea. He survives storms, captivity, and a profitable spell as a Brazilian planter before a shipwreck casts him up, the sole survivor, on a deserted island near the mouth of the Orinoco. There he will live for twenty-eight years.

Robinson Crusoe is the patient, gripping record of one man keeping himself alive and sane with nothing but salvaged tools and his own ingenuity — building shelter, raising crops and goats, making bread and pottery and a boat, marking the days, and finding in his solitude a hard-won faith. Then, after fifteen years, he discovers a single naked footprint in the sand, and the long quiet of his island is broken forever.

Published in 1719 and first presented to the world as a true memoir, the book helped invent the modern novel with its plain, fact-by-fact realism. It has since been read as a parable of faith, of self-made economic man, and — more searchingly in our own time — of empire, in the figure of the islander Crusoe names Friday. It founded a whole genre and has never been out of print.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition, its real-life castaway inspiration, and its method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.