Robinson Crusoe

To a deserted island where there is neither God nor nature nor death—as Virginia Woolf expressed it—arrives a Robinson Crusoe who has ignored his father's advice and who, pursued by his bad luck and after more than twenty years of rigorous solitude, finds a human footprint in the sand. Based on a historical reality (it was customary at the time to abandon a sailor on a deserted island for disciplinary reasons), and on the real experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe was born, an extremely popular book in the 19th century, which Georges Méliès brought to the screen in the early days of cinema. Thus, from the work of Defoe, "a poet of man's patient struggle with matter, of the humility, difficulty, and grandeur of creation," was born one of the archetypes of the history of world literature.