Today is the birthday of such an array of fascinating and important authors that one is tempted to give up and go hide with a good book.

It’s the birthday of one of the big ones, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), best known for his novel Robinson Crusoe, sometimes called the first English novel (but them’s fightin’ words). Defoe was born in London and died in London, and in between he survived the Great Plague of 1665/66,  the Great Fire of London in 1666, a political climate antithetical to practicing Presbyterians such as his family, and a great deal of conflict with the government, thanks to his pamphleteering and controversial opinions as William III gave way to Queen Anne, etc. etc. Then there were his problems with debt (which landed him in prison more than once), and the predictably named Great Storm of 1703 (which prompted him to write The Storm in 1704), and he also had eight children with his wife Mary, six of whom survived to adulthood, so the man was busy. Finally in 1719 he got down to business and wrote Robinson Crusoe, which was somewhat based on the real-life adventures of Alexander Selkirk and which was Extremely Important to the development of the novel (whether or not it was actually the first) because it presented the quotidian struggles of an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances—“the great early document of radical individualism” which was to set the course for novelistic endeavors for centuries to come. (See article.)

In 2011, novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote this New Yorker article about his fairly miserable trek to the island 500 miles off Chile where Selkirk had the adventures that Crusoe wrote about. While there, Franzen released some of the ashes of novelist David Foster Wallace, who had killed himself about two years earlier. Franzen also reread Robinson Crusoe while there.

NB: Robinson Crusoe is one of those books everyone thinks they’ve read even if they haven’t, because everyone knows the basic premise. But if you haven’t read it, it might surprise you. Spoiler alert: there are raisins. (I know, right?!)

It’s also the birthday of Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), J.B. Priestley (1894-1984), Roald Dahl (1916-1990), Else Holmelund Minarik (1920-2012), Judith Martin a.k.a. Miss Manners (b. 1938), and more…

Have a good Thursday spent in communion with your fellow humans rather than radical isolation and stay scrupulously honest to the data.