When the novel’s first edition came out in 1719, the title page read, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account how he was at last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Not surprisingly, the full title is rarely used. [1]
The famous castaway tale, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was first published on 25 April 1719. Written by Daniel Defoe, his name does not appear anywhere in the first edition leading many early readers to believe Crusoe was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.
Epistolary, confessional, and moralistic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer. He is a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, roughly resembling Tobago, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called “Más a Tierra” (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.
Despite its simple narrative style, Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world and became an instant classic, with four editions printed in the first year of publication. It has been credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre and is often described as the first English novel. It was a runaway success, and Defoe quickly wrote two sequels, The Farther Adventures (1719) and Serious Reflections … of Robinson Crusoe (1720).
Robinson Crusoe has gone on to become one of the most widely published books in history and the second-most translated book in the world, spawning so many imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television, and radio, that its name is now used to define a genre, the Robinsonade.