Recommendations
Books Like Robinson Crusoe
Best books to read after Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is the founding text of the English novel — Crusoe's twenty-eight years alone on an island, building a life from shipwreck wreckage, is one of literature's most enduring fantasies of solitude and self-sufficiency. These recommendations extend the experience through Defoe's other novels and through fiction about isolation, survival, and the colonial encounter that Robinson Crusoe inaugurated.
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Moll Flanders
by Daniel Defoe
Defoe's 1722 novel about the pragmatic survivor Moll Flanders is the direct companion to Robinson Crusoe — the same documentary realism, the same first-person narrator who assesses their situation with calculating clarity, but the female experience of poverty and survival in England rather than the male experience of isolation on an island.
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A Journal of the Plague Year
by Daniel Defoe
Defoe's 1722 quasi-documentary account of the 1665 London plague — presented as the memoir of a contemporary eyewitness — is the most ambitious experiment in the documentary realism that Robinson Crusoe established. It is Defoe's most formally sophisticated work and a direct ancestor of the modern documentary novel.
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Foe
by J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee's 1986 novel retells Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a woman named Susan Barton who was on Crusoe's island and whose story was suppressed when Defoe wrote Crusoe's. Friday, given a severed tongue, cannot speak for himself; the novel is about whose story gets told and whose voice is taken. The essential critical response to Crusoe.
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The Swiss Family Robinson
by Johann David Wyss
Wyss's 1812 family adventure novel about a shipwrecked Swiss family building a life on a tropical island is the direct descendant of Robinson Crusoe in the survival-fantasy tradition — more genial and more domestic, but organized around the same pleasures of practical ingenuity and resourcefulness.
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Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
Golding's 1954 novel, which strands British schoolboys on an island and watches civilization collapse, is the twentieth-century reversal of Robinson Crusoe's optimism about human resourcefulness — where Crusoe builds civilization from wreckage, Golding's boys destroy civilization despite having nothing to impede them.
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The Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Martel's 2001 novel about a boy adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger is the twenty-first century's most direct engagement with the Robinson Crusoe survival tradition — the same documentary realism, the same animal companion, the same question of how a person makes meaning in radical isolation.
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Cast Away
by William Broyles Jr.
The 2000 film, while not a novel, is the most widely seen contemporary engagement with the Robinson Crusoe template — the middle-class American stranded on an island, building shelter and companionship (with a volleyball) from available materials. Its relationship to Crusoe is as direct as any literary adaptation.
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The Martian
by Andy Weir
Weir's 2011 novel about an astronaut stranded alone on Mars who survives by applying his knowledge to available materials is the science fiction Robinson Crusoe — the same documentary precision about how survival works, the same pleasure in watching a competent person solve problems with limited resources.
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