Book Bearings
Robinson Crusoe
- 274 pages · about 5 hours
- First published 1686
- 2,420 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
Robinson Crusoe, an Englishman on one of his voyages, is the only survivor when his ship is wrecked, and he is cast away on a remote tropical island. He spends twenty-eight years there, providing for himself by his own labor, and in time meets cannibals, captives and mutineers. Daniel Defoe's book, first published in 1719 and written partly as a journal and a confession, has been described as the first English novel. The story is thought to draw on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years alone on a Pacific island.
- Survival
- Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks
- Historical fiction
- Adventure
- Shipwreck survival
- Classics
- Airplane crash survival
- Imaginary Voyages
2 What to expect
The original castaway story: a shipwrecked Englishman survives alone for decades on a tropical island by patient labor and ingenuity. Much of it is a detailed, practical account of building, farming and making do, mixed with religious reflection, and the interest lies in the process more than in events. The prose is plain eighteenth-century English, the pace is slow, and its attitudes to slavery and to other peoples are those of a colonial age.
Good for readers who want: a classic survival story, an early English novel, and a hands-on castaway adventure.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Daniel Defoe
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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