Robinson Crusoe

Against his father's wishes, young Robinson Crusoe of York goes to sea, is captured by pirates and enslaved in Morocco, escapes and becomes a planter in Brazil, then is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island near the mouth of the Orinoco. Alone for years, he salvages tools from the wreck, builds a shelter, grows grain, tames goats and keeps a journal, until one day he finds a single human footprint in the sand.

Published in 1719, the book was presented as a true memoir and became one of the most influential novels ever written. Some scholars have wondered whether Defoe knew Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the Andalusian tale of a man alone on an island, which had been translated into English in 1708.

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was the son of a London butcher, became a merchant, went bankrupt more than once and turned to writing pamphlets. In 1703 he was put in the pillory for a satire on religious intolerance, and he later worked as a secret agent for the government in Scotland.

He was nearly sixty when he published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and in the next few years he wrote Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. He wrote hundreds of works in all, and is often called one of the fathers of the English novel.