More by Daniel Defoe

[Jessica]

More Books by Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe
Widely regarded as the first English novel, this is one of the most popular and influential adventure stories of all time. This classic tale of shipwreck and survival on an uninhabited island was an instant success when first published in 1719 and has inspired countless imitations. In his own words, Robinson Crusoe tells of the terrible storm that drowned all his shipmates and left him marooned on a deserted island. Forced to overcome despair, doubt, and self-pity, he struggles to create a life for himself in the wilderness.

A Journal of the Plague Year
This is a classic 1722 account of the epidemic that ravaged England nearly 60 years earlier. Defoe used his considerable talents as a journalist and novelist to reconstruct -- historically and fictionally -- the Great Plague of London in 1664-65. Written as an eyewitness report, the novel abounds in memorable and realistic details.

A General History of the Pyrates
Considered the major source of information about piracy in the early 18th century, this fascinating history profiles the deeds of Edward (Blackbeard) Teach, Captain Kidd, Anne Bonny, others.

Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress
Defoe's last and darkest novel is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own 'wicked' life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. A resourceful adventuress, she is also an unforgiving analyst of her own susceptibilities, who tells us of the price she pays for her successes. Endowed with many seductive skills, she is herself seduced: by money, by dreams of rank, and by the illusion that she can escape her own past.

Colonel Jack
Subtitled "The History & Remarkable Life of the Truly Honorable Colonel Jacque, Commonly Called Colonel Jack." Beginning in the alleyways of London and ending in the plantations of Virginia, colonel Jack offers a recollection of a life of crime.

Additional Recommended Reading

Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures
Richard West
West brings the many baffling, colorful facets of Daniel Defoe's person and career into striking focus. Here is Defoe the tradesman, soldier, and spy, the journalist, novelist, satirist, newsman, and pamphleteer. Consistent only in his failure as a businessman, Defoe would never manage to provide adequately for his wife and their six children, neither in commerce nor by his undeniably prolific pen -- a pen that in the year following Defoe's imprisonment, by West's estimate, wrote a half million words. That same year Defoe also founded a newspaper, The Review, for which he created such features as the lead story, the obituary, foreign news analysis, the gossip column, and the advice column. With a finesse and independence of spirit not unlike his subject's own, West unfolds his story of a maverick Defoe, a Puritan but no prude, a Dissenter without a constituency, a hack who never failed to pursue the truth.

[GrandmaJean]

If I like Moll Flanders I think I'd like to try Roxana the Fortunate Mistress and Daniel Defoe: the Life and Strange Surprising Adventures.

[Everyman]

You might not want to overlook Robinson Crusoe. I know it's generally viewed as a teen-aged-boy story simply of a shipwreck, which is how I read it when I was in school. I thought this about it until I heard a lecture which talked about it as a study of the development of human technology, paralleling how Defoe saw humans developing over the millenia in terms of housing, agriculture, domestication of animals, etc. I haven't gone back to re-read it with that perspective, but want to some day. But the lecturer (it's part of the Teaching Company lectures on the English Novel) made it sound like amuch more complex book than I had ever given it credit for being.

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GrandmaJean wrote:
If I like Moll Flanders I think I'd like to try Roxana the Fortunate Mistress and Daniel Defoe: the Life and Strange Surprising Adventures.

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[GrandmaJean]

That certainly would put a new slant on Robinson C.

a study of the development of human technology, paralleling how Defoe saw humans developing over the millenia in terms of housing, agriculture, domestication of animals, etc