Crusoe is an adventure-drama television series, based loosely on the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The series' 13 episodes aired on NBC from October 17, 2008, to January 31, 2009, during the first half of the 2008–2009 television season. It follows the adventures of Robinson Crusoe: a man who has been shipwrecked on an island for six years and is desperate to return home to his wife and children. His lone companion is Friday, a native whom Crusoe rescued and taught English.
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Crusoe filming at College Street, York
Robinson Crusoe is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary, confessional, and didactic forms, the book follows the title character after he is cast away and spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966. Pedro Serrano is another real-life castaway whose story might have inspired the novel.
Title page from the first edition
The route taken by Robinson Crusoe over the Pyrenees mountains in chapters 19 & 20 of Defoe's novel, as envisaged by Joseph Ribas
Statue of Robinson Crusoe at Alexander Selkirk's birthplace of Lower Largo by Thomas Stuart Burnett
Book on Alexander Selkirk