Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. He was the son of James Foe, a butcher. He changed his name to Defoe from 1695. He attended Morton’s academy for Dissenters at Newington Green. He married Mary Tuffley. He took part in Monmouth’s rebellion and joined William III´s army in 1688.

His first important signed work was An Essay upon Projects. He also wrote many pamphlets for which he was imprisonment.

Defoe produced some 560 books, pamphlets, and journals, but the works for which he is best known belong to his later years. Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719, the Farther Adventures following a few months later. The next years saw the appearance of his most important works of fiction: Adventures of Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, etc.

Defoe´s influence on the evolution of the English novel was enormous, and many regard him as the first true novelist. He was a master of plain prose and powerful narrative, with a journalist’s curiosity and love of realistic detail. His peculiar gifts made him one of the greatest reporters of his time, as well as a great imaginative writer who in Robinson Crusoe created one of the most familiar and resonant myths of modern literature.

Daniel Defoe, a prolific author of journal articles and novels, achieved his greatest fame through writing this work. First published in 1719, it lays claim to being the first English novel and was very influential upon later significant writers. Rousseau recommended it as the first book a young boy should read. Coleridge referred to it as an illustration of the universal man. Karl Marx employed it to demonstrate economic theory applied. These notables aside, what reader young or old can forget the thrill of reading about being stranded alone on an island, then Friday appearing and the ensuing adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 15991ucp43sfp1t

Robinson Crusoe differs from most of Defoe´s earlier works in that it represents private moral zeal rather than a public plea for reform. Propaganda it may be, but its emphasis is on spiritual rather than on political justice. Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner gives over only some two – thirds of his narrative to his life on his desert island, but the account of those twenty – eight years forms the most compelling section of his memoirs. He is an ideal choice of narrator given the extraordinary nature of his experiences. Crusoe is of good family and because of his sound education “not bred to any trade”. His decision to go to sea is an act of rebellion.

The author tells how Crusoe built himself a house, domesticated goats, and made himself a boat. He describes the perturbation of his mind caused by a visit of cannibals, his rescue from death of an indigenous inhabitant he later names Friday, and finally the coming of an English ship whose crew are in a state of mutiny, the subduing of the mutineers, and Crusoe´s rescue. Defoe followed it with The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which with Friday he revisits his island, is attacked by a fleet of canoes on his departure, and loses Friday in the encounter.

The book is unique fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of men and women as social creatures, and it reveals an extraordinary ability to invent a sustaining modern myth.

Deofe probably based part of Crusoe´s tale on the real – life experiences of Alexander Selkirk a Scottish sailor. He was a son of a shoemaker of Largo, who had run away to sea and joined a privateering expedition under Capt. William Dampier, was, at his own request, put ashore on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez. He was rescued in 1709 by Woodes Rogers. Defoe embellished the narrative of his residence on the island with many incidents of his imagination and presented it as a true story. The extraordinarily convicing account of the shipwrecked Crusoe´s successful efforts to make himself a tolerable existence in his solitude first revealed Defoe´s genius for vivid fiction. Defoe was nearly sixty when he wrote it. cf991u5143sffp

Robinson Crusoe is read as eagerly today as when it was first published. The book has attained a high place in the literature of the world. It is probably the worlds favourite adventure story. For more than two centuries, Daniel Defoe´s Robisnon Crusoe has delighted readers with its delicate portrayal of physical and emotional survival. Shipwrecked upon a deserted island, a sailor most somehow build a new life.

Crusoe has become an emblem of human survival in a lonely and hostile world.