Transcriber’s Note
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ROBINSON CRUSOE
ROBINSON CRUSOE
by
DANIEL DEFOE
Pictures by
N. C. WYETH
NEW YORK
Cosmopolitan Book Corporation
M C M X X
ILLUSTRATOR’S PREFACE
The universal fame of The Life and Adventures of RobinsonCrusoe is second only to the Bible. Notwithstandingits simple narrative style, as well as the absence of thesupposedly indispensable love motive, no modern book canboast of such world-wide esteem.
Written by Daniel Defoe and published in England in1719 by William Taylor, the Life and Adventures won immediatepopularity. Its phenomenal success called forth five reprintingsin rapid succession. In the following year cametranslations into French, German and Dutch, marking thebeginning of an unprecedented series of translations into manyother languages and dialects.
And now, after two centuries, the story still stands secureand enduring—a monumental human document.
Hundreds of illustrated editions of The Life and Adventuresof Robinson Crusoe have been published, and manymore will follow, but I, like most illustrators enthusiastic intheir work, have anticipated for years the opportunity whichis now offered to me in the present edition.
The outstanding appeal of this fascinating romance to mepersonally is the remarkably sustained sensation one enjoysof Crusoe’s contact with the elements—the sea and thesun, the night and the storms, the sand, rocks, vegetationand animal life. In few books can the reader breathe, liveand move with his hero so intensely, so easily and so consistentlythroughout the narrative. In Robinson Crusoe wehave it; here is a story that becomes history, history livingand moving, carrying with it irresistibly the compellingmotive of a lone man’s conquest over what seems to beinexorable Fate.
Do my pictures add a little to the vividness of this story?Do I aid