The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, lived in England from 1661 to 1731. He was a brave, liberty-loving man who was always in opposition to the tyranny of the government, and was many times punished for his independent speech and lively interest in the wrongs of his fellows. We do not know positively what inspired him to write the story, or where he got his facts. It has been generally believed that his tale was founded on The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, a book which was published about seven years before Robinson Crusoe appeared, in 1719. Selkirk was a buccaneer on a ship cruising in the South Atlantic. He quarreled violently with his captain, and at his own request was put ashore alone on the island of Juan Fernandez. Here he lived for four years and four months, and was then rescued by a privateer. The adventures of Selkirk have so little in common with those of Robinson Crusoe that it is doubtful whether Defoe had the former in mind at all. Moreover, there had been published in England some twenty years before Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe the story of Peter Serrano, who was shipwrecked and lived for several years on an island near the mouth of the Orinoco. This is the scene of Robinson Crusoe, and it is probable that Defoe was influenced by Serrano's story. The title-page of the first edition is as follows: "The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner; Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un- inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely delivered by Pyrates. Written by Himself. London: Printed for W. Taylor at the Ship in Pater-Noster-Row. MDCCXIX" The story as Defoe tells it is vividly written in what seems to us now rather quaint phraseology, but everything appears so simple and so real that it is hard to believe that the man who wrote the story did not really have the experiences he relates. Defoe did not intend to write a book for children, and Robinson Crusoe is really the first great English story, and the forerunner of our modern novels. The book, however, became very popular, and the children seized upon it at once and made it their own particular story. Countless editions of it have been printed, and it has been translated into almost every modern language. Besides this, there have been dozens of English versions of Robinson Crusoe, from simple little tales in words of one syllable, to finer editions in which Defoe's language has been modernized and a really new story created. However, there is nothing so charming and so real as Crusoe's own account of himself, and the selections which follow are taken from the larger book just about as they were written by Defoe.