Defoe the Novelist
He was nearly sixty when he turned to writing novels. In 1719 he published his famous Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, followed by two less engrossing sequels. Based in part on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe describes the daily life of a man marooned on a desert island. Although there are exciting episodes in the novel—Crusoe rescuing his man Friday from cannibals—its main interest derives from the way in which Crusoe overcomes the extraordinary difficulties of life on the island while preserving his human integrity. Robinson Crusoe is considered by some critics to be the first true novel in English.
Defoe's great novels were not published under his name but as authentic memoirs, with the intention of gulling his readers into thinking his fictions true. Two excellent examples of his semihistorical recreations are the picaresque adventure Moll Flanders (1722), the story of a London prostitute and thief, and an account of the 1665 great plague in London entitled A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).
Defoe's writing is always straightforward and vivid, with an astonishing concern for circumstantial detail. His other major works include Captain Singleton (1720), Colonel Jack (1722), Roxana (1724), and A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27). In 1724 A General History of the Pyrates by a Captain Charles Johnson was published; it was not until 200 years later that Defoe was discovered to be the true author of the work (see edition by Manuel Schonhorn, 1972).
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