Born into a Nonconformist family named Foe (he did not add the extra letters to his name until he was in his early forties), Daniel Defoe led an extraordinarily chequered career. At various times in his life, he was a hosiery merchant in London, a participant in the Monmouth Rebellion, the owner of a tile factory in Tilbury and an undercover agent for the government in the north of England and Scotland. He was also an exceptionally prolific, pioneer journalist, producing hundreds of polemical pamphlets and newspaper articles, most of them anonymously. He did not begin writing fiction until he was approaching sixty. Defoe's imagination was stirred by the story of the real-life sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned on a desert island in 1704, and he began to write what became Robinson Crusoe. What fascinated Defoe about Selkirk's experience was the idea of a civilized man forced to confront the natural world stripped of all that made him civilized. How would such a man cope with the challenges? Crusoe, when he is shipwrecked on his island, has little but his resourcefulness and his ingenuity to sustain him. None the less he succeeds in adapting himself to the alien environment and, as he records in the journal he keeps during his long endurance test, he survives there for nearly 30 years. Probably the most famous scenes in the book record Crusoe's alarming discovery of strange footprints in the sand on his island home and his subsequent encounter with Man Friday, the native he rescues from the cannibals who use the island as a venue for their grisly feasts. Combining the exotic fascination of the kind of travel literature that was growing in popularity at the time it was written with the kind of inner voyage described in spiritual autobiographies, Robinson Crusoe has retained its fame and popularity for nearly three centuries.

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