To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, the University of Virginia Press reissues its first-ever publication. The volume’s two accounts of the 1609 wreck of a Jamestown-bound ship offer a gripping sea adventure from the earliest days of American colonization, but the dramatic events’ even greater claim to fame is for serving as the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s last major work, The Tempest.William Strachey was one of six hundred passengers sailing to Jamestown as pa...

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe. This first edition credited the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. Despite it...

'To write a book that makes the reader sit in a trance, lost in his passionate desire to pack a suitcase and go to the fabulous place - that, in the end, is something one would give a sack of nutmeg for' Philip Hensher, The SpectatorIn 1616, an English adventurer, Nathaniel Courthope, stepped ashore on a remote island in the East Indies on a secret mission - to persuade the islanders of Run to grant a monopoly to England over their nutmeg, a fabulously val...

Gulliver's Travels, Into into Several Remote Nations of the World - Adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, by Jonathan Swift. Gulliver's Travels, is a novel by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift (also known as Dean Swift) that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature.The book became popular as soon as it was published (John Gay wrote in a letter to Swift...

'Robinson Crusoe has a universal appeal, a story that goes right to the core of existence' Simon ArmitageDaniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe**, regarded by many to be first novel in English, is also the original tale of a castaway struggling to survive on a remote desert island.**The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a desert island. In his journal he chronicles his daily battle to stay alive, as he ...

First published in 1849, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is an account the author's boat trip from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire in 1839. Thoreau was accompanied by his brother, John, who died of tetanus in 1842 and to whom the book is a tribute. It is noted for its detailed descriptions of nature, and it is interwoven with profound digressions on such topics as religion, poetry, and history. This volume is highly recommended for lovers of nature writing and...

HAVING taken more than ordinary Pains in collecting the Materials which compose the following History, we could not be satisfied with our selves, if any Thing were wanting to it, which might render it entirely satisfactory to the Publick: It is for this Reason we have subjoined to the Work, a short Abstract of the Laws now in Force against Pyrates, and made Choice of some particular Cases, (the most curious we could meet with) which have been heretofore tried, by which it will appear what ...

"The Storm" (1704) is a founding document of modern journalism. It tells of the events of November 1703, when a hurricane struck Britain. It is composed of verbatim eyewitness accounts, solicited from survivors through a newspaper advertisement that Defoe placed shortly after the hurricane struck.This account remains a required reading for journalism students to this day.

'I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life...I likewise taught him to say Master' Robinson Crusoe's seafaring adventures are abruptly ended when he is shipwrecked, the solitary survivor on a deserted island. He gradually creates a life for himself, building a house, cultivating the land, and making a companion from the native whose life he saves. Daniel Defoe's enthralling story-telling and imaginatively detailed descriptions have ensur...

Edited and with Notes by Shelly EversleyIntroduction by Robert Reid-PharrIn this truly astonishing eighteenth-century memoir, Olaudah Equiano recounts his remarkable life story, which begins when he is kidnapped in Africa as a boy and sold into slavery and culminates when he has achieved renown as a British antislavery advocate. The narrative “is a strikingly beautiful monument to the startling combination of skill, cunning, and plain good luck that allowed him to win his fr...

From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central – a hugely original fictional history of Pocahontas, John Smith, and the Jamestown colony in VirginiaIn Argall, the third novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as th...