Audiobook · read by volunteers
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
Read by Denny Sayers (d. 2015) · 20 chapters · 13 h 55
About the book
Robinson Crusoe goes to sea against his father's advice, and the sea teaches him hard lessons. He is captured by pirates, escapes, makes a fortune in Brazil, and then, on a later voyage, is wrecked in a storm and cast ashore on an island, the only survivor. With a few salvaged tools he must build a shelter, grow food, tame goats and keep his mind from despair. Years pass before he sees a footprint in the sand. Daniel Defoe's novel is the original tale of a castaway, a story of ingenuity, faith and loneliness that has delighted readers of all ages for three centuries. Twenty chapters and nearly fourteen hours will take you to a desert island you will not soon forget.
Introduction
Daniel Defoe lived from 1660 to 1731. A merchant, pamphleteer and journalist, he began writing fiction when he was nearly sixty, and Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719 with the full title The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, was his first novel. It is considered by many to be the first English novel.
The book was inspired in part by the real-life experiences of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent more than four years alone on an island in the Pacific. Defoe transformed this material into a fictional memoir, written in the plain, circumstantial voice of a man who describes what he did and why. Readers of all ages, the young above all, have long drawn inspiration from the resourcefulness of its hero, the sole survivor of a shipwreck who is marooned on an uninhabited island.
Readers today will also notice features of the book that reflect its time, among them its attitudes to religion, trade and the people Crusoe meets, which have been discussed and criticised at length. The story is also read as a parable of the self-made man.
This recording was made by a LibriVox volunteer. It is divided into twenty chapters, each with its own title, the first being Start in Life, and lasts nearly fourteen hours. Why listen? Because the practical details of Crusoe's survival are absorbing, and because the book's questions about solitude and self-reliance are as relevant today as when it first appeared.
Public domain
Daniel Defoe died in 1731: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text