Biography:
Along with Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel. He produced some 200 works of nonfiction prose in addition to close 2,000 short essays in periodical publications, several of which he also edited.

Defoe was born as the son of James Foe, a butcher of Stroke Newington. He added "De" to his name about 1700.  Defoe studied at Charles Morton's Academy, London.  Although his Nonconformist father intended him for the ministry, Defoe plunged into politics and trade, traveling extensively in Europe. Throughout his life Defoe also wrote about mercantile projects. In the early 1680s he was commission merchant in Cornhill but went bankrupt in 1691. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley, they had two sons and five daughters. Defoe was involved in Monmouth rebellion in 1685 against James II. Later he became supporter of William II, joining his army in 1688, and gaining a mercenary reputation because change of allegiance.

He obtained a government post in 1695 and the same year wrote "An Essay upon Projects," a remarkably keen analysis of matters of public concern, such as the education of women. Especially noteworthy among his writings during the next several years was the satiric poem "The True-born Englishman" (1701), an attack on beliefs in racial or national superiority, which was directed particularly toward those English people who resented the new king, William III, because he was Dutch.

The following year Defoe anonymously published a tract entitled "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters," which satirized religious intolerance by pretending to share the prejudices of the Anglican church against Nonconformists. Himself a Dissenter, Defoe mimicked the extreme attitudes of High Anglican Tories and pretended to argue for the extermination of all Dissenters.  In 1703, when it was found that Defoe had written the tract, he was arrested and given an indeterminate term in jail. Robert Harley, the speaker of the House of Commons, secured his release in November 1703, probably on the condition that he agree to become a secret agent and public propagandist for the government.

In his own days Defoe was regarded as an unscrupulous, diabolical journalist. His most remarkable achievement during Queen Anne's reign was the periodical A Review of the Affairs of France, and of All Europe (1704-1713), which was published weekly and later three times a week and resembled modern newspapers. From 1716 to 1720 Defoe edited Mercurius Politicus, then the Manufacturer (1720), and the Director (1720-21). He was also contributor from 1715 to periodicals published by Nathaniel Mist.

Defoe achieved literary immortality when in April 1719 he published Robinson Crusoe, which was based partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways such as Alexander Selkirk. The account of a shipwrecked sailor was a comment both on the human need for society and the equally powerful impulse for solitude. By giving vivid reality to a theme with large mythic implications, the story have since fascinated generations of readers as well as authors like Joachim Heinrich Campen, Jules
Verne, R.L. Stevenson, J.M. Coetzee, and other creators of Robinsonade stories.

During the remaining years, Defoe concentrated on books rather than pamphlets and at the age of 62 he published Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year and Colonel Jack. His last great work of fiction, Roxana, appeared in 1724. In the 1720s Defoe had ceased to be politically controversial in his writings, and he produced several historical works, a guide book, an examination of the treatment of servants, a business guide, and works involving the supernatural.  He died on 26 April, 1731, at his lodgings in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields.

Another brief, relatively accurate, and interestingly footnoted biography can be found at:
http://incompetech.com/authors/defoe/

Background:
In 1704 Alexander Selkirk, who had run away to sea and joined a privateering expedition (an armed ship that is privately owned and manned, commissioned by a government to fight or harass enemy ships), requested to be put ashore on the uninhabited island of Jan Fernandez off the coast of Chile.  He was rescued in 1709 by Woodes Rogers.  The story was covered extensively in journals of the day, and Defoe was probably familiar with several versions of the tale.  When writing Crusoe, Defoe may have been building upon this story and ideas from his imagination.  The fact that Defoe presents the novel as a true story has more to do with literary conventions of the day than reality.

Although Richard Steele's account of Selkirk's experience and the later account by Selkirk's rescuer (Rogers) of the voyage in which Selkirk was discovered, the second edition of which appeared the year before Crusoe, are often cited as the spark for Crusoe, there can be little doubt that the experience of many other sailors and castaways from this explosive early phase of English transoceanic exploration, commerce and settlement were brought together in the novel as well.  As an entrepreneur and merchant himself, for whom trade was his "beloved subject" and one of whose businesses was the insuring of ships, the widely traveled Defoe was well aware of these mariner experiences long before the Steele account was published in December 1713 or the subsequent publications of the Rogers account up to 1718.

It has been suggested that the second publication in 1718 of the Rogers account of Selkirk's island experiences may have provided the stimulant for the incident of seeing Friday's footprints in the sand.  Given the human propensity to seek simple causalities, I suspect this is also the reason that the Rogers report on Selkirk's experience has been asserted as the source for the Crusoe story as a whole. This latter is surely incorrect, even though it is at least conceivable that the island setting (in addition to the footprints in the sand incident) may also have been a stimulant for that of Crusoe.

Defoe's interest in trade was inextricably entwined with his interest in politics. Born of modest circumstance and raised in what would become for well more than a century a center of the Protestant Dissenter intellectual tradition, he came to perception in the brutal political environment of Restoration England in the wake of the Treaty of Dover, the Cabal, and when the terms Whig and Tory made their bitter debut. At age 23 he wrote his first pamphlet, in the same year that Locke (then in exile) wrote the famed Two Treatises. Their ideas, and those of many other English writers of the late 17th century, were converging long before Locke's great works were published in 1689. Defoe opposed James II and welcomed William, giving vigorous support to the Orange King in a series of pamphlets. His 1701 poem is yet a valid critique of racial prejudice. And his famed 1706 poem was a brilliant attack on the notion of divine right at the dawn of the new age of the natural right philosophy which intellectually captured the economic experience of 17th century England (when England, as they say, "went Dutch") and paved the way for the economic reforms of the 1690s and the trading and financial empire whose economic success in war and peace alike was in turn the primal stimulant for the French Enlightenment.

Inherent in these early expressions of natural rights philosophy was the notion of the state of nature and the partly Hobbesean fear of the anarchy, chaos and violence that it entailed if not brought to heel. Defoe was obsessed by this notion of the individual struggling in the state of nature, and his own real life alternating experiences of entrepreneurial success, imprisonment, bankruptcy (caused by imprisonment in the most famous instance), and hounding by creditors no doubt contributed to this. All of Defoe's characters are in a sense solitary individuals who are placed in remarkable circumstances almost for the purpose, it seems, of revealing their constant struggles with a dangerous and hostile ambient world. This was a world that Defoe knew more than well. The conceptualization of the type of situation in which Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe, and others found themselves did not simply pop into Defoe's head at the age of 58 years as a result of reading some new publication that year or of doing some alleged interview at age 51 when Selkirk returned to England for the first time in 16 years. These conceptions had been forming in Defoe's mind over the course of his entire life. In a sense, they were his life.

Several modern writers, such as James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott and Edward Said, have criticized Defoe's Robinson Crusoe for being a allegory of Western (British) colonialism or imperialism, and thus for advocating to its reading public the suppression of other cultures.  Typically, this interpretation is sustained by documents revealing Defoe's advocation of colonial expansion, and by text fragments expressing Robinson Crusoe's attitude towards the  "wilderness," towards the cannibals, or towards his servant Friday.  Nevertheless, one can also find some reflective passages in Robinson Crusoe revealing doubts about the colonial enterprise, and relativism towards cultural values.

Electronic Sources:
Outlines of the two most common interpretations of the novel can be found at Dr MacLachlan's lecture outline page. To find out more about Selkirk look at James and Mayme Bruce's page on him.  An interesting discussion of postcolonialism, including Robinson Crusoe, can be found on James McCorkle's page and on Josh Zuiderveen's page.

1.  How should we read Crusoe?  Is Defoe holding him up as an exemplar of the best, most industrious, most ingenious type of Englishman?  What in the book could make us question whether we're supposed to think Crusoe is a positive role model?  (he IS a cruel cat killer, among other things!).  Is Crusoe ever a hypocrite?

2.  Defoe, with his background in journalism, took great pains to write Robinson Crusoe as a "factual" narrative, not as a fable or romance. How well do you think he succeeded? Is the book, in fact, "realistic?" Consider such aspects as psychological realism (would a man alone on a desert island "really" respond as Crusoe does?), coincidence, and believability. What stylistic details give the book its claim to realism?

3.  At the end of the narrative, Crusoe has become a wealthy and prosperous man. Was he, after all, correct to disregard his father's advice and go to sea? Is Crusoe a "hero," a character that the reader admires? In what ways do you find the character of Crusoe attractive and/or unattractive?

4.  What do we learn about politics in England by the way Crusoe establishes his own kingdom?   What are some of the negative aspects associated with "economic individualism?" What costs are unaccounted for in this account of a "self-made" man? Consider Xury the Moorish boy, "his man" Friday, the place of the family, the place of women.

5. What do we learn about slavery?  Crusoe himself was a slave for a time.  Did he learn anything as a result?

6. How is the novel an example of the two clashing world views in 1719--a world that accepted Biblical and church authority and an emerging enlightenment philosophy that relied on individual observation, reason, and action?