Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was published as a fictional memoir in 1719. It was so commercially successful that he quickly wrote a sequel. Realizing that fake autobiographies made a good profit, Defoe wrote four more first-person narratives before 1724, The best known are Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and The Fortunate Mistress, or Roxana (1724).

Today Robinson Crusoe remains a popular adventure narrative. In fact, the book gave rise to the "Robinsonade," adventure tales that rework the structural elements of Crusoe's island tale. Moreover, the character of Robinson Crusoe is recognized as a literary and cultural icon, like Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust; the story of a man stuck on a deserted island has become familiar to nearly everyone in the Western world.