Robinson Crusoe (Defoe novel)

Robinson Crusoe is an adventure novel by the English writer Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. It tells of a young man from Kingston upon Hull, born Robinson Kreutznaer, who goes to sea against his parents' wishes, is enslaved by pirates, builds a plantation in Brazil and is then shipwrecked, spending 28 years on a remote tropical island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, where he meets cannibals, captives and mutineers before his rescue. The first edition named Crusoe himself as the author, and many readers took the book for a true travelogue. The story is thought to draw on the life of the Scottish castaway Alexander Selkirk. It is often credited as the start of realistic fiction and has been called the first English novel, though those claims are disputed. The book ran through four editions in its first year and spawned so many imitations that its name defines a genre, the Robinsonade.