Widely acknowledged as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe's adventure story of a shipwrecked sailor became an instant classic upon its publication in 1719 and the yardstick for countless castaway narratives to follow. Robinson Crusoe is more than a great yarn, it is an allegory rife with moral and religious symbolism and significance, seen through the eyes of an ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances The book is a kind of epic of human endeavour ceaselessly striving ...