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Book appreciation: Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe's tale of redemption

Daniel Defoe, author of the first and best-known survival novel in the English language, was a survivor himself. Born around 1660, he lived through 1665's Great Plague of London, in which 100,000 people - 25 per cent of the population - perished. The next year, his family's house was one of only three in their neighbourhood left standing after the Great Fire of London.

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Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
W. Taylor
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Daniel Defoe, author of the first and best-known survival novel in the English language, was a survivor himself. Born around 1660, he lived through 1665's Great Plague of London, in which 100,000 people - 25 per cent of the population - perished. The next year, his family's house was one of only three in their neighbourhood left standing after the Great Fire of London.

Jack-of-all-trades Defoe was a trader with questionable business practices, a spy for the British crown and a prolific political pamphleteer. Frequently on the run from creditors, he was jailed as a debtor and again for seditious libel. Even his name was not his own: Daniel Foe had added the "De" to make himself sound more aristocratic.

Defoe was a versatile writer, publishing more than 500 books, journals, pamphlets and poems on subjects as diverse as religion, marriage, politics, psychology and crime. His detached narrative style, coupled with a flair for detail and realism, mean Defoe is often lauded as the father of British journalism.

That said, he was never a master of the punchy sound bite: the original title of was .

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Published when Defoe was about 60 years old, was his first novel (later outings included and , both 1722). The tale is the fictionalised autobiography of a shipwrecked Englishman who survived for 28 years on a deserted island somewhere in the Caribbean, possibly modelled on the real-life story of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned for four years on a South Pacific island.

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