Search -
Readers Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Readers Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Author:Daniel Defoe Like many another youth in seventeenth-century England, Robinson Crusoe had "rambling thoughts" and longed for the life of a seafaring man. Despite his mother's pleas and his father's advice, in what he later describes as "an ill hour, God knows," he took ship from Hull when he was nineteen years old. Thus began the amazing fictional odyssey whi... more »ch Daniel Defoe has chronicled as vividly as if it were fact. Crusoe met with storm and shipwreck, with pirates and with savages, and for twenty-seven years he was marooned on a lonely island in the Caribbean Sea. But with courage, common sense, and an abiding faith in God's providence, he survived. His is one of the world's great adventure stories, an enduring testimony to man's ingenuity in the time of his testing. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was, like his unforgettable hero, often forced to live by his wits. The son of a London butcher, he attended a Nonconformist school, married early, and had a large family. He made and lost fortunes in business, was imprisoned and pilloried for his dissenting beliefs, and served as a secret agent for the government. At one time he visited Spain as a commission merchant, and it is upon this experience, and upon the actual adventures of one Alexander Selkirk whom he met in the port of Bristol, that he is believed to have based Robinson Crusoe. Though in the course of his stormy career he wrote countless religious and political pamphlets, he is best remembered for this book and for two other novels: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. Includes 8 pages of full-color illustrations.« less