Robinson Crusoe

When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, many of the readers who quickly became obsessed with the adventure story were convinced that it was a true-life travelogue written by its protagonist. Three centuries later, the book remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel.

The book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about the entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized, and it stands at the beginning of a long tradition of colonial literature and representation that still resounds today. Now with a new introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and vivid illustrations by the Mexican artist Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe invites readers to reconsider this tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued.