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Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island, encountering natives, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. This device, presenting an account of supposedly factual events, is known as a “false document” and gives a realistic frame story.

The story was most likely influenced by the real-life events of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived more than four years on the Pacific island that was called Más a Tierra (in 1966 its name became Robinson Crusoe Island), Chile. However, the description Crusoe’s island was probably based on the island of Tobago, since that island is near the mouth of the river Orinoco, and in sight of the island of Trinidad. It is also likely that Defoe was inspired by the Latin or English translations of Abubacer’s Philosophus Autodidactas, an earlier novel also set on a desert island. Another source for Defoe’s novel may have been Robert Knox’s 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.

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