Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe first published
on 25 April 1719. This first edition credited the works
fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author
leading many readers to believe he was a real person and
the book a travelogue of true incidents. It was published
under the considerably longer original title The Life and
Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York
Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an
un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America near the Mouth
of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore
by Shipwreck wherein all the Men perished but himself.
With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliverd
by Pyrates. Epistolary confessional and didactic in form
the book is a fictional autobiography of the title
character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer)—a
castaway who spends years on a remote tropical island near
Trinidad encountering cannibals captives and mutineers
before being rescued.The story is widely perceived to have
been influenced by the life of Alexander Selkirk a
Scottish castaway who lived for four years on the Pacific
island called M?s a Tierra (in 1966 its name was changed
to Robinson Crusoe Island) Chile. However other possible
sources have been put forward for the text. It is possible
for example that Defoe was inspired by the Latin or
English translations of Ibn Tufails Hayy ibn Yaqdhan an
earlier novel also set on a desert island. Another source
for Defoes novel may have been Robert Knoxs account of his
abduction by the King of Ceylon in 1659 in An Historical
Account of the Island Ceylon Glasgow: James MacLehose and
Sons (Publishers to the University) 1911.