Crusoe

January, 1719. A man sits at a table, writing. Nearly sixty, Daniel Defoe is troubled with gout and 'the stone', burdened with a large family and debts, 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 - the only book he has written, published nearly forty years before. The large folio is now worn and tattered, crammed with extra pages covered in notes and emendations.

A leaner copy of Knox's book is also on the shelf in Defoe's library, perhaps even open on the table as he writes. The title page distils its contents: 'An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon in the East Indies: Together with an Account of the Detaining in Captivity of the Author and diverse other Englishmen now Living there and of the Author's Miraculous Escape. Illustrated with Figures and a Map of the Island. By Robert Knox, a Captive there near Twenty Years'.

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. But by 1719, despite Knox's efforts to have a revised edition published, it has long been out of print.

If Defoe had died in 1718, the year before he wrote *Robinson Crusoe* , few of us would have heard of him. He is principally remembered for this book and its hero. They have a life of their own: in the years since it was published, *Crusoe* has been abridged, imitated, parodied, dramatized, turned into opera, pantomime, comic books and cartoons, made into a string of films, adapted for reality television and translated into every written language.

Where did Crusoe come from? And what is the secret of his endurance? *Crusoe* explores the intertwined lives of two real men: Daniel Defoe and Robert Knox and the character and book that emerged from their peculiar conjunction. It is the biography of a book and its hero, the story of Defoe, the man who wrote *Robinson Crusoe,* and of Robert Knox, the man who *was* Crusoe.