Books

London: Printed for W. Taylor at the Ship in Pater-Noster-Row, 1719. Near fine.. Rare early set of the realist novel that transformed English literature, with the first volume a second edition and the second volume a first edition. Based in part on the celebrated narrative of castaway Alexander Selkirk, Defoe's novel is an adventure set in the New World that describes Crusoe developing self-reliant virtues in order to survive. Crusoe has become a modern mythic figure in the West: he is a hero of economic individualism on a modern Odyssey, born during the rise of English capitalism. Both entertaining and morally uplifting, the book represented an ideal formula in the early years of realist fiction; ROBINSON CRUSOE soon became an international bestseller, with more translations than any work except the Bible, and established a path for future novelists in the growing market for realist literature that matured in 18th-century England. It is often described as one of the earliest novels…

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, is one of the earliest and most influential novels in the history of English literature. It is a fictional autobiography of the title character, a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story is widely perceived as a comment on the British Imperialism of the age and the emerging ideology of the 'self-made man', and it reflects on the author's vast array of experiences.