Shipwrecked alone on a desert island for nearly three decades, Robinson Crusoe has nothing but grit, ingenuity, and a battered Bible to survive — until a single footprint in the sand changes everything. Daniel Defoe's 1719 castaway tale is often called the first true English novel, and it's easy to see why: it's still a gripping, page-by-page account of what it takes to build a life from nothing. The original survival story, and the ancestor of every desert-island tale that followed.