Robinson Crusoe
A man is shipwrecked on an island, builds a shelter, keeps a journal and spends twenty-eight years alone before meeting another human being. Defoe based the story on a real castaway, but the novel's power comes from its accounting: lists of tools, stores, goats and days.
It is often read as an adventure and as a parable of colonialism, and both readings are supported by the text. The middle section, in which Crusoe teaches Friday, is the part modern readers find hardest. The book is also a practical manual, and that is why it has never gone out of date.
Public-domain status
First published in 1719. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Daniel Defoe died in 1731, so this work has been free to republish there since 1802.
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