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Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe · novel, 1719·9 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version9 hrs → 50 sec
  • His father's "middle station of life" speech fails to hold him. His father calls it "the best state in the world," free of the miseries of both rich and poor, and weeps describing it. Crusoe waits less than a year, then runs off to Hull and gets on a ship regardless.
  • The shipwreck kills ten men; only Crusoe survives. A wave smashes him against a rock before he can stand: "The blow taking my side and breast, beat the breath as it were quite out of my body." He is the only one of eleven men in the boat who reaches land alive.
  • He calls thirty-six pounds of coin a "drug" and keeps it anyway. Standing in the wrecked ship's cabin he says aloud, "O drug, what art thou good for? I have no manner of use for thee," then wraps the money in canvas and swims it to shore anyway.
  • One footprint in the sand undoes years of composure. He circles the spot, checks it is not "fancy," then flees home "not feeling the ground I went on" and cannot sleep that night, cycling through theories that it was the devil himself.
  • He names his rescued companion after the day he saved him. Then has to teach him not to eat the men just killed: Friday points to where two cannibals are buried, making "signs to me that we should dig them up again and eat him." Crusoe forces him to burn the whole feast site to ashes instead.
  • Twenty-eight years, two months, nineteen days: then home. He leaves the island on 19 December 1686 and lands in England the following June, thirty-five years after he first left home. The ship's owners hand him almost two hundred pounds sterling as thanks for saving their cargo.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it invented the survival-log as a literary form, Crusoe's compulsive tallying of goods, days, and moral debts to God is the template every deserted-island and disaster narrative since has copied.

A shipwrecked Englishman spends twenty-eight years alone on an island, and the book is less about survival than about the account he keeps of it.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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