When Defoe was nearly sixty years of age he turned to fiction and wrote the great work by which he is remembered. Robinson Crusoe was an instant success, and the author became famous all over Europe.  Other stories followed rapidly, and Defoe earned money enough to retire to Newington and live in comfort; but not idly, for his activity in producing fiction is rivaled only by that of Walter Scott.  Thus, in 1720 appeared Captain Singleton, Duncan Campbell, and Memoirs of a Cavalier; in 1722, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and the amazingly realistic Journal of the Plague Year.  So the list grows with astonishing rapidity, ending with the History of the Devil in 1726.

In the latter year Defoe’s secret connection with the government became known, and a great howl of indignation rose against him in the public print, destroying in an hour the popularity which he had gained by a lifetime of intrigue and labor.  He fled from his home to London, where he died obscurely, in 1731, while hiding from real or imaginary enemies.

WORKS OF DEFOE.  At the head of the list stands Robinson Crusoe (1719- 1720), one of the few books in any literature which has held its popularity undiminished for nearly two centuries.  The story is based upon the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig, who had been marooned in the island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, and who had lived there in solitude for five years.  On his return to England in 1709, Selkirk’s experiences became known, and Steele published an account of them in The Englishman, without, however, attracting any wide attention.  That Defoe used Selkirk’s story is practically certain; but with his usual duplicity he claimed to have written Crusoe in 1708, a year before Selkirk’s return.  However that may be, the story itself is real enough to have come straight from a sailor’s logbook.  Defoe, as shown in his Journal of the Plague Year and his Memoirs of a Cavalier, had the art of describing things he had never seen with the accuracy of an eyewitness.

The charm of the story is its intense reality, in the succession of thoughts, feelings, incidents, which every reader recognizes to be absolutely true to life.  At first glance it would seem that one man on a desert island could not possibly furnish the material for a long story; but as we read we realize with amazement that every slightest thought and action—­the saving of the cargo of the shipwrecked vessel, the preparation for defense against imaginary foes, the intense agitation over the discovery of a footprint in the sand—­is a record of what the reader himself would do and feel if he were alone in such a place.  Defoe’s long and varied experience now stood him in good stead; in fact, he “was the only man of letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert island without finding himself at a loss what to do;"[215] and he puts himself so