A man washed ashore on an uninhabited island begins reconstructing civilization from its foundations, building shelter, taming goats, firing pottery, keeping a calendar scratched into wood so that time does not dissolve. Daniel Defoe published this novel in 1719, and its power lies not in adventure but in inventory, the meticulous record of what a solitary mind requires to remain human. Crusoe is both everyman and colonist, and the novel cannot be separated from the imperial assumptions it embodies so unselfconsciously. When Friday appears, the island becomes a kingdom with a single subject. The book inaugurated the English novel's obsession with the self made and remade in isolation, a spiritual exercise disguised as a castaway tale.