The world-wide popularity of _Robinson Crusoe_ is chiefly due (1) to the peculiar genius of the author; (2) to his journalistic training, which enabled him to seize on the essential elements of interest and to keep these in the foreground; (3) to the skill with which he presents matter-of-fact details, sufficient to invest the story with an atmosphere of perfect reality; (4) to his style, which is as simple and direct as the speech of real life, and which is made vivid by specific words describing concrete actions,--such as hewing a tree, sharpening a stake, hanging up grapes to dry, tossing a biscuit to a wild cat, taking a motherless kid in his arms; and (5) to the skill with which he sets a problem requiring for its solution energy, ingenuity, self-reliance, and the development of the moral power necessary to meet and overcome difficulties. Young and old follow with intense interest every movement of the shipwrecked mariner when he first swims to the stranded ship, constructs a raft, and places on it "bread, rice, three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dried goat's flesh, a little remainder of European corn, and the carpenter's chest." Readers do not accompany him passively as he lands the raft and returns. They work with him; they are not only made a part of all Crusoe's experience, but they react on it imaginatively; they suggest changes; they hold their breath or try to assist him when he is in danger. Defoe's genius in making the reader a partner in Robinson Crusoe's adventures has not yet received sufficient appreciation. The author could never have secured such a triumph if he had not compelled readers to take an active part in the story. It was for a long time thought that Defoe was ignorant, that he accidentally happened to write _Robinson Crusoe_ because he had been told of the recent experience of Alexander Selkirk on a solitary island in the Pacific. It is now known that Defoe was well educated, versed in several languages, and the most versatile writer of his time. _Robinson Crusoe_ was no more of an accident than any other creation of genius. Defoe's other principal works of fiction are: _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, the story of a soldier's adventures in the seventeenth century; _The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton_, a graphic account of adventures in a journey across Africa; _Moll Flanders_, a story of a well-known criminal; and _A Journal of the Plague Year_, a vivid, imaginative presentation, in the most realistic way, of the horrors of the London plague in 1665. These works are almost completely overshadowed by _Robinson Crusoe_; but they also show Defoe's narrative power and his ability to make fiction seem an absolute reality. In writing _Gulliver's Travels_, Swift received valuable hints from Defoe. Stevenson's _Treasure Island_ is the most successful of the almost numberless stories of adventure suggested by _Robinson Crusoe_. JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745