Robinson Crusoe

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Robinson Crusoe
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Daniel Defoe
Introduction by Virginia Woolf
SeriesModern Library Classics
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:320
Dimensions(mm): Height 202,Width 130
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Classic fiction (pre c 1945)
ISBN/Barcode 9780375757327
ClassificationsDewey:823.5
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Random House USA Inc
Imprint Modern Library Inc
Publication Date 12 June 2001
Publication Country United States

Description

Defoe's Classic adventure of a shipwrecked mariner surviving on his wits and ingenuity with new introduction, commentary, notes and reading group guide.

Author Biography

Daniel Defoe was born Daniel Foe in London in 1660. It was perhaps, ineveitable that Defoe, an outspoken man, would become a political journalist. As a Puritan he believed God had given him a mission to print the truth, that is, to proselytize on religion and politics, and in fact, he became a prolific pamphleteer satirizing the hypocrisies of both Church and State. Defoe admired William III, and his poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) won him the King's friendship. But an ill-timed satire on High Church extremists, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, published during Queen Anne's reign, resulted in his being pilloried and imprisoned for seditious libel in 1703. At fifty-nine Defoe turned to fiction, completing The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), partly based on the saga of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor; Moll Flanders (1722); Colonel Jack (1722); A Journal of the Plague Years (1722); and Roxana or the Fortunate Mistress (1724).

Reviews

"Beyond the end of Robinson Crusoe is a new world of fiction. Even though it did not know itself to be a 'novel,' and even though there were books that we might now call 'novels' published before it, Robinson Crusoe has made itself into a prototype . . . Perhaps because of all the novels that we have read . . . the novelty of Defoe's fiction is the more striking when we return to it. Here it is, at the beginning of things, with its final word reaching out into the future." -from the Introduction by John Mullan