ABOUT THE BOOK

Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.

But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized that still resound today. As celebrated Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid writes in her bold new introduction, “The vivid, vibrant, subtle, important role of the tale of Robinson Crusoe, with his triumph of individual resilience and ingenuity wrapped up in his European, which is to say white, identity, has played in the long, uninterrupted literature of European conquest of the rest of the world must not be dismissed or ignored or silenced.”

ABOUT RESTLESS CLASSICS

We all have “the list”: those classic books that we have the best intentions of reading, but which, after graduating from school, become less urgent priorities. We've set out to address this problem with Restless Classics—a series of beautifully packaged, newly introduced and illustrated great books from the past that still speak to our time, our place, and, especially, our restlessness. In addition to their original artwork and fresh introductions, Restless Classics brings the classroom experience to the reader with linked online teaching videos.

Find out more at restlessbooks.com/classics. 

Praise for the Restless Classics Edition

“There are a couple of ways to read a book written three hundred years ago. One can read it viewing the world as it was in the time the book was written, or one can assume today’s societal values and political correctness. In this edition, readers really can have it both ways. One can read the text of the book alone and enjoy the beautiful writing of Daniel Defoe and this rather incredible adventure story, or one can begin with the amazing introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and read the book with today’s point of view…. Defoe’s works were groundbreaking and deserve to be read through an historical lens, giving today’s readers an opportunity to see how much the world has, thankfully, changed.”

—Rosi Hollinbeck, Manhattan Book Review

Praise for Robinson Crusoe

“The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe; virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness.”

—James Joyce

“[Robinson Crusoe] is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective… The mere suggestion—peril and solitude and a desert island—is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men.”

—Virginia Woolf

“Like Odysseus embarked for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on Rocinante, Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella has become a figure in the collective consciousness of the West, transcending the book which—in its multitude of editions, translations, imitations, and adaptations (“Robinsonades”)—celebrates his adventures. Having pretended once to belong to history, he finds himself in the sphere of myth.”

—J.M. Coetzee

“Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology and, if need be, racism and imperialism.”

—Carlos Fuentes

“I thought it that Robinson Crusoe should be the only instance of a universally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no one cry . . . I will venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising instance of utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of Friday.”

—Charles Dickens

“Was there every anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?”

—Samuel Johnson