Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe. It was published under the full title The Life and Strange Surprising 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 of 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 deliver'd by Pyrates. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character-a castaway who spends decades on a remote tropical island, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers.