Robinson Crusoe is a young man who burns to escape from the mercantile life that his family expects him to pursue. Young Crusoe wants adventure--a chance to go off to sea and explore the world. Defying his father and spurning all warnings, Crusoe grabs a sudden opportunity to get on a departing ship. Despite several bad omens, he decides to leave England behind and set off to sea for good.
Crusoe quickly encounters a few of the hazards his father had warned him about. His joyous adventure is reduced to a series of calamitous mishaps, until he is finally shipwrecked alone on a tropical island.
Left completely to his own devices, Crusoe proves to be amazingly resourceful. As the years pass, he builds a life for himself, though he dreams of being delivered from his captivity of isolation. As Crusoe wrestles with his fate, he ponders the nature of God and the sometimes conflicting impulses of the human animal. At long last, a stranger arrives--Friday, who enters Crusoe's self-contained existence and offers the immeasurable gift of human fellowship.
In many ways, the world is a smaller place than it was when Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, but the human need for escape, for resilience and resourcefulness, and for companionship is as large as ever. Defoe's story of an ordinary man struggling to survive on a deserted island still reaches to the core of the human spirit.
About the Author
London-born Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) pursued a variety of careers including merchant, soldier, secret agent, and political pamphleteer. He wrote books on economics, history, biography, and crime. But he is best remembered for his fiction, which he began to write late in his life and which includes the novels Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the celebrated Robinson Crusoe.
