Daniel Defoe Books

In the beginning there were whispers—rumors drifting over from Holland, murmurs that a great sickness had returned to Amsterdam and might follow the trade routes to England. Few believed it; fewer wished to. But in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, death took its first quiet lodgings. The victi...

From A Journal of the Plague Year

Officials strained to impose order upon a disorder that defied comprehension. The Bills of Mortality, published weekly, became our city’s barometer of despair. Each line, enumerating the dead by parish, was studied with morbid fascination, as if numbers could contain grief. At first, the Lord Mayor ...

From A Journal of the Plague Year

Moll begins her life in the shadow of crime, born to a convicted mother in Newgate Prison. Her earliest memory is of deprivation paired with the faint promise of freedom. When her mother’s sentence is commuted and she is sent to the colonies, Moll is left behind, an infant without inheritance or pro...

From Moll Flanders

Moll’s widowhood forces her to reckon with a cruel truth: to be a single woman in England without property is to be invisible. Determined to secure her place, she turns her wit into her livelihood, learning to mask her poverty behind polite deceit. One marriage follows another, each a transaction sh...

From Moll Flanders

I was not content with the quiet estate my parents wished for me. My father, a sensible man, urged me to remain at home and live moderately, but I was captivated by stories of ships, foreign lands, and fortunes made upon the waves. Against all prudence, I embarked upon voyages that quickly taught me...

From Robinson Crusoe

Once I realized my survival depended solely on myself, my hands became restless tools of invention. I explored the island and built my habitation upon a rocky height, fortifying it with stakes and a wall of earth. Each task, no matter how small, grew into a measure of sanity. Without work, despair w...

From Robinson Crusoe