Robinson Crusoe: 300th Anniversary Edition (Restless Classics)

There are a couple of ways to read a book written three hundred years ago. One can read it viewing the world as it was in the time the book was written, or one can assume today’s societal values and political correctness. In this edition, readers really can have it both ways. One can read the text of the book alone and enjoy the beautiful writing of Daniel Defoe and this rather incredible adventure story, or one can begin with the amazing introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and read the book with today’s point of view. This book is a classic for good reasons. Many believe it was the first novel. It certainly became a model for later great novels such as Gulliver’s Travels and Moby Dick and even modern novels like The Road and The Martian, not to mention movies like The Castaway. Dafoe wrote this book in journal form, so realistically his readers thought it was a real diary, a style he effectively used in A Journal of the Plague Year as well. Dafoe’s works were groundbreaking and deserve to be read through an historical lens, giving today’s readers an opportunity to see how much the world has, thankfully, changed.