Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is an adventure novel by the English writer Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719.

The book follows its title character, born Robinson Kreutznaer, through a set of voyages and then through the wreck that leaves him the only survivor. He spends twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, and most of the novel is taken up with how he keeps himself alive there: shelter, food, tools and the routines he builds to stay level. He encounters cannibals, captives and mutineers before he is finally rescued. The narrative is written as his own account of the years, which is part of why it reads as though it were a true relation. The story is usually taken to have been suggested by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was marooned on an island in the Pacific.

The book mixes confessional, epistolary and didactic forms.