Good Day Citizens!

And thank you for listening to this week's podcast edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

Robinson Crusoe, a novel by Daniel Defoe, published in 1719, four editions in the first few months,

a runaway bestseller, one of the earliest of all novels, one of the best to this day, and more than that, paradigmatic.

In other words, there are millions of people who know the Robinson Crusoe story who have never

read it because the story is that deeply embedded in the understanding we have of the history of the West.

It really did make a fortune for a defoe and I think I mentioned in the show that in researching it,

the first year it was released, it was four printings.

Yes, and he then went on to write a sequel which wasn't very good.

He wrote a bunch of other novels including a couple that I really like, Mall Flanders, which is another economic story of a

prostitute, a young woman who was kind of from the wrong side of the tracks and sort of wound up

being a whore and eventually flourishes and becomes an economic success.

That was scandalous, but it's not very salacious,

but it was scandalous at the time.

And then Journal of a Plague Year,

which is his fictionalized account

of the great Bubonic plague of the 1660s

that carried off one in six or seven of all the people in London.

But it's fairly factual, isn't it?

It's factual, but it's fictionalized, and that's one of the things.

The novel wasn't, no one really knew yet quite what the novel was going to be.

They're inventing it. And so he's using a kind of a. the

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