A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of one of the most famous adventure stories of all time, starring Roy Marsden as Robinson Crusoe.
David Herbert Lawrence was born 11 September 1885 in Eastwood,
Nottinghamshire.His father was a miner and his mother was a
schoolteacher.In 1906 he took up a scholarship at Nottingham
University to study to be a teacher. His first novel, The White
Peacock, was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching in 1911
due to illness. In 1912 he met and fell in love with a married
woman, Frieda Weekley, and they eloped to Germany together.They
were married in 1914 and spent the rest of their lives together
travelling around the world. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow
which was banned in Great Britain for obscenity. Women in Love
continues the story of the Brangwen family begun in The Rainbow and
was finished by Lawrence in 1916 but not published until 1920.
Another of Lawrence's most famous works, Lady Chatterley's Lover,
was privately printed in Florence in 1928 but was not published in
Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an unsuccessful
court case brought against it for obscenity. As well as novels,
Lawrence also wrote in a variety of other genres and his poetry,
criticism and travel books remain highly regarded. He was also a
keen painter. D.H. Lawrence died in France on 2 March 1930.
Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. He worked briefly as a
hosiery merchant, then as an intelligence agent and political
writer. His writings resulted in his imprisonment on several
occasions, and earned him powerful friends and enemies. During his
lifetime Defoe wrote over two hundred and fifty books, pamphlets
and journals and travelled widely in both Europe and the British
Isles. Among his most famous works are Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll
Flanders (1722) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Though
Defoe was nearly sixty before he began writing fiction, his work is
so fundamental to the development of the novel that he is often
cited as the first true English novelist. He is also regarded as a
founding father of modern journalism and one of the earliest travel
writers. Daniel Defoe died in April 1731.
Never since childhood have I been so thoroughly immersed in a
book—Jim Crace, Financial Times
An 18th-century reader, raised on a high-minded diet of elegy and
pastoral, must have felt stunned on first encountering the jagged
prose of a Daniel Defoe, with its street-wise populism and delight
in the commonplace—Terry Eagleton
Robinson Crusoe has a universal appeal, a story that goes right to
the core of existence—Simon Armitage, Guardian
Defoe should surely be credited with inventing the English
novel—Mail on Sunday
Defoe was an imaginative genius—John Carey, Sunday Times
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