Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731) was born in London as the son of a butcher. In his youth, he travelled all over Europe as a merchant, and he joined the army in 1688. Before he started writing his first novel at the age of nearly sixty, he had also worked as an economist, a journalist and a spy.

In 1702 he published a small book The Shortest Way with Dissenters, in which he said the best thing to do with dissenters (people who were not members of the Church of England) was to hang them. Defoe was just making fun because he was a dissenter himself, but he was misunderstood and thrown into jail. After being in jail, he became a suspicious man and was always very careful with his money. He wrote many, mainly political, works in his lifetime, but he will probably be best remembered for the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), as well as Moll Flanders, Roxana and A Journal of the Plague Year. In the last book, Defoe describes in a very realistic way what it was like to live in London during the plague, even though he was only five years old at the time it happened.

Robinson Crusoe is based on a true story which Defoe had heard about. In 1704, a Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk, had an argument with the captain of a ship and asked to be put ashore on an uninhabited island. He lived there alone until he was picked up by another English ship five years later. At the time, the story made a great impression in England, and there was a general feeling of optimism about what Man was able to do. In his novel about Robinson Crusoe, Defoe shows his great ability to write realistic fiction.

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe. Easy Classics - After 4 years of English; Aschehoug A/S, Egmont, Denmark, 1996