TODAY IN HISTORY: Robinson Crusoe published

Daniel Defoe's fiction work "Life and the strange adventures of Robinson Crusoe" is only published. The book, about a shipwrecked sailor who spends 28 years on a desert island, is based on the life experiences of real shipwrecked sailors and on Alexander Selkirk, a Scot who spent 4 years on a small desert island off the coast of South America. in the 1700s. Like the hero Crusoe, his author was an average, middle-class Englishman, he was not a member of the nobility like almost all writers of that era. Defoe was a small merchant who filed for bankruptcy in 1692, and why he had to start writing pamphlets. In 1702, he published one that satirized the church, which led to his arrest and an insurrection trial in 1703. Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford, who freed him from Newgate prison and hired him as a political writer and spy to support his own opinions. To this end, Defoe created The Review, where he edited and wrote from 1704 to 1713. It was not until 1760 that he began writing fiction. Among his other successes were "Moll Flanders" (1722) and "Roxana" (1724). He died in London in 1731, one day before the twelfth anniversary of the publication of "Robinson Crusoe".