On this date in English literary history – April 25,
1719, Daniel Defoe's fictional work The Life and Strange Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe was published. The book, about a shipwrecked sailor who
spends 28 years on a deserted island, is based on the experiences of shipwreck
victims and of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a
small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s. Like his hero
Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was an ordinary, middle-class Englishman, not an educated
member of the nobility like most writers at the time. Defoe established himself
as a small merchant but went bankrupt in 1692 and turned to political
pamphleteering to support himself. A pamphlet he published in 1702 satirizing
members of the High Church led to his arrest and trial for seditious libel in
1703. He appealed to powerful politician Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, who
had him freed from Newgate prison and who hired him as a political writer and
spy to support his own views. To this end, Defoe set up the Review,
which he edited and wrote from 1704 to 1713. It wasn't until he was nearly 60
that he began writing fiction. His other works include Moll Flanders
(1722) and Roxana (1724). He died in London in 1731, one day before the
12th anniversary of Robinson Crusoe's publication.
His book can be purchased at Amazon through the following
link:
