\" And now I saw how easy it was for the providence of God to make even the most miserable condition of mankind worse.\" The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work\'s protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer) – a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before ultimately being rescued.