Loading…

Robinson Crusoe is unavailable, but you can change that!

In Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe creates one of the first major pieces of realistic fiction, a seminal work in the development of this literary genre. The 1719 novel combines epistolary, confessional, and didactic techniques to create a fictional autobiography of the titular character. The British seaman Crusoe lives nearly 30 years on an island near Trinidad, after being the lone survivor of a...

with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by one thing, viz., that this was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed