Crusoe

"January 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty, Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and mired in political controversy and legal threats. But for the moment he is preoccupied by a younger man on a barren shore: Robinson Crusoe. Several miles south, another old man, Robert Knox, sits bent over a heavy volume published nearly forty years before. Knox's 'Historical Relation' was a best seller when it was published in 1681, just a year after he escaped from Ceylon and returned to England. Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? Crusoe explores the…