Robinson Crusoe

The classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, now in a new, illustrated Restless Classics edition with an introduction contextualizing the book for our globalized, postcolonial era. 

When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, many of the readers who quickly became obsessed with the adventure story were convinced that it was a true-life travelogue written by its protagonist. Its original, full title drew them in: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Three centuries later, the book remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of the colonizers toward the colonized, and it stands at the beginning of a long tradition of colonial literature and representation that still echoes today. Now with a new introduction by rising Jamaican-born journalist and scholar Garnette Cadogan and vivid illustrations by the Mexican artist Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe invites readers to reconsider this tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before ultimately being rescued.

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was an English writer, journalist, and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel, Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist and journalist who focuses on history, culture, and the arts. He is editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro) and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Harlem Renaissance (with Shirley E. Thompson; forthcoming). His current research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. He has received research fellowships from Yale University, the University of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and New York University, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge. At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, Cadogan is writing a book on walking.

Born in Mexico in 1958, Eko is a cartoonist, engraver, and painter. His wood etchings, often erotic in nature and the focus of controversial discussion, are part of a broader tradition in Mexican folk art popularized by Jose Guadalupe Posada. He has collaborated on projects for the New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Spanish daily El Pais, in addition to having published numerous books in Mexico and Spain. He is the illustrator of three books in the Restless Classics series: Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and Robinson Crusoe.