Shipwrecked alone on a Caribbean island, a castaway spends decades building a life from wreckage and wit before meeting the man he calls Friday. Often called the first English novel.
Books that mention Robinson Crusoe (68)
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: “De Foe in his Cruso, his Moll Flanders, Religious Courtship, Family Instructor, and other pieces, has imitated it with success”
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: “From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company.”
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins: “In the first part of ROBINSON CRUSOE, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written:”
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell: “A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe--a prisoner immured in a dungeon for life--nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as "a man."”
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: “The Young Man's Best Companion, The Farrier's Sure Guide, The Veterinary Surgeon, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Ash's Dictionary, the Walkingame's Arithmetic, constituted his library; and though a limited series, it was one from which he had acquired more sound informa-…”
My Ántonia by Willa Cather: “I got 'Robinson Crusoe' and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours.”
Bleak House by Charles Dickens: “Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read it, though he had had no other on his desolate island.”
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope: “Those scraps of paper, so easily destroyed, apparently so little respected, may hereafter be acknowledged to have had a value greater, so far greater, than their weight in gold! If "Robinson Crusoe" had been lost!”
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: “I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did--invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy.”
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens: “Well, Wally,' resumed the old man, after a short pause: 'not being like the Savages who came on Robinson Crusoe's Island, we can't live on a man who asks for change for a sovereign, and a woman who inquires the way to Mile-End Turnpike.”
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton: “another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits”
Typee by Herman Melville: “Robinson Crusoe could not have been more startled at the footprint in the sand than we were at this unwelcome discovery.”
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: “Oh, hunting pictures in Germany, and Robinson Crusoe and funny pictures about cannibals.”
Little Men by Louisa May Alcott: “Demi was never tired of reading and explaining his favorite books, and many a pleasant hour did they spend in the old willow, revelling over "Robinson Crusoe," "Arabian Nights," "Edgeworth's Tales," and the other dear immortal stories that will delight children for centuries to come.”
Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott: “We are Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday going to see if the savages have come," she said presently, for her fancy was full of the dear old stories that all children love so well.”
A Sportsman's Sketches by Ivan Turgenev: “saw an old man so infirm that he reminded me at once of the dying goat Robinson Crusoe found in some cave on his island.”
Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: “Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere--least of all in India, where we are few in the land, and very much dependent on each other's kind offices.”
Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne: “and to some extent, I verily believe, of Selkirk (Robinson Crusoe), whom he considered in no wise inferior to the rest.”
Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana: “Near this was a variety of huts or cottages, nearly an hundred in number, the best of them built of mud and white washed, but the greater part only Robinson Crusoe like--of posts and branches of trees.”
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume: “A female Robinson Crusoe," says a writer who prided himself upon being a keen observer of human nature--"a female Robinson Crusoe would have gone mad for want of something to talk to."”
Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “What is this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle? Pliny? Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe.”
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine: “…them in part of the circumstances, because almost all romantic stories have been suggested by some actual circumstance; as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, not a word of which is true, were suggested by the case of Alexander Selkirk.”
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey: “He drew up elaborate tables, after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, with the reasons for and against his acceptance of the post:”
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller: “"The Swiss Family Robinson," "The Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," "Little Women," and "Heidi,"”
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs: “My uncle had left it sticking there when he made the trap-door. I was as rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could have been at finding such a”
The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett: “…of his way; and asked me if I had got never a piece of secret history, thrown into a series of letters, or a volume of adventures, such as those of Robinson Crusoe, and Colonel Jack, or a collection of Conundrums, wherewith to entertain the plantations.”
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: “Poor Robin Crusoe he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island.”
Hard Times by Charles Dickens: “She drew herself up, and stood behind a tree, like Robinson Crusoe in his ambuscade against the savages; so near to them that at a spring, and that no great one, she could have touched them both.”
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope: “It will no doubt be understood that George Vavasor did not roam about in the woods unshorn, or wear leathern trappings and sandals, like Robinson Crusoe, instead of coats and trousers.”
The Valley of the Moon by Jack London: “You're Robinson Crusoe an' I'm your man Friday.”
Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy: “No, in her soul she's as solitary as Robinson Crusoe, though she has acquaintances in plenty, if not relations.”
Ulysses by James Joyce: “Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes”
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington: “Guy de Maupassant’s stories, “Robinson Crusoe,” “Sappho,””
Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Walter Pater's version of 'Robinson Crusoe.'”
One of Ours by Willa Cather: “Later he found arithmetic and geography more interesting than "Robinson Crusoe."”
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster: “Blue Beard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre”
The Amethyst Ring by Anatole France: “can't we call the dog Thursday, like Robinson Crusoe who called his man Friday”
The Last Man by Mary Shelley: “I compared myself to that monarch of the waste—Robinson Crusoe.”
The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery: “I'd wanted to own one ever since I'd read Robinson Crusoe.”
The Magus by John Fowles: “For the second time that day I felt like Robinson Crusoe.”
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño: “I felt like Robinson Crusoe when he discovers the footstep in the sand.”
Why Read the Classics by Italo Calvino: “Essay 'Robinson Crusoe, Journal of Mercantile Virtues' (primary subject)”
Rob Roy by Walter Scott: chapter epigraph: 'It happened one day about noon... the print of a man's naked foot on the shore' — Robinson Crusoe
My Life by Richard Wagner: “the vicar...used to tell us the story of Robinson Crusoe”
Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray: “as real and actual beings for this young gentleman as--whom shall we say?--as Robinson Crusoe, or Peter Wilkins, or the Seven Champions of Christendom, whose histories were in his library.”
Redburn by Herman Melville: “a foggy Saturday, when school-boys stay at home reading Robinson Crusoe.”
The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Wibird Hawkins were half so nice as Robinson Crusoe; and I didn't send my little pocket-money to the natives of the Feejee Islands, but spent it royally in peppermint-drops and taffy candy.”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “He is reminiscent of Swift's Lemuel Gulliver and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe; like them, the Mariner seems an accurate observer”
Life of Pi by Yann Martel: “"You can't possibly have read all of Narayan?" "These matters are important to me, Mother." "Robinson Crusoe!" "Mother!" "But Piscine!" she said.”
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman: “Richard found himself remembering a theatrical performance of Robinson Crusoe he had been taken to, as a child: this was what Robinson Crusoe might have looked like, if he had been shipwrecked on a rooftop instead of a desert island.”
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman: “So Thackeray Porringer had died in a fury, clutching his copy of Robinson Crusoe, which was, apart from a silver sixpence with the edges clipped and the clothes he had formerly been standing up in, all that he owned.”
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell: “Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at fifty-eight.”
Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin: “a text that stands as a modern, secular version of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a favourite text with Calvino's Marxist mentor Vittorini”
Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk: “living on hills and mountains and in forests, a little like Robinson Crusoe”
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: “from Don Quixote or even The Tale of Genji, to Robinson Crusoe, Moby-Dick, and the literature of today”
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino: “Called a philosophical novel without knowing it, and discussed as the basis for Michel Tournier's Vendredi”
There but for the by Ali Smith: “'the author of the book called Robinson Crusoe had a brick factory'”
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss: “"It is," said I; "but we must not call Robinson Crusoe a romance; though Robinson himself, and all the circumstances of his history are probably fictitious, the details are all founded on truth--on the adventures and descriptions of voyagers who may be depended on, and unfortunate individuals who have actually been wrecked on unknown…”
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens: “where children's books were sold, and where poor Robinson Crusoe stood alone in his might, with dog and hatchet, goat-skin cap and fowling-pieces;”
Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle: “from Sanchoniathon to Dr. Lingard, from your Oriental Shasters, and Talmuds, and Korans, with Cassini's Siamese fables, and Laplace's Mecanique Celeste, down to Robinson Crusoe and the Belfast Town and Country Almanack, are familiar to him”
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving: “many an unlucky urchin is induced to run away from his family and betake himself to a seafaring life from reading the history of Robinson Crusoe;”
John Halifax, Gentleman by Dinah Mulock Craik: “"What books have you got through?" "All you sent--Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Arabian Nights.”
Light, Wind and Dreams by Atsushi Nakajima: “Speaking of Robinson Crusoe, my Treasure Island is naturally in question. It is strange that most people do not believe I put all my strength into that work; I wrote it as seriously as I later wrote Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae. [auto-translated]”