With its fast-moving narrative and resourceful, sympathetic hero, Robinson Crusoe is a book of universal appeal. When his ship capsizes in a violent storm, Robinson rescues himself as the sole survivor on an apparently uninhabited island. With the simplest of means, he builds a new life for himself and for many years lives completely on his own until one day he saves the life of a young native. . . Robinson Crusoe is also a work of considerable moral and religious significance, a fine tension set up between God's purpose and Crusoe's very human impulses, which Defoe depicts with vibrant and haunting realism.

Published in 1719, towards the end of Daniel Defoe's distinguished career as a man of letters, Robinson Crusoe can be regarded as one of the first English novels. It is the product of a powerful imagination: vivid and profound.