The Swiss Family Robinson

The authoritative original English version of a beloved classic.

One of the world's best-loved stories of shipwreck and survival, The Swiss Family Robinson portrays a family's struggle to create a new life for themselves on a strange and fantastic tropical island. Blown off course by a raging storm, the family, a Swiss pastor, his wife, their four young sons, plus two dogs and a shipload of livestock, must rely on one another in order to adapt to their needs the natural wonders of their exotic new home. Inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, this classic story of invention and adventure has fired the imaginations of readers since it first appeared in 1812. Freely translated over the years, with major sections excised and new subplots added, the novel is published here in its original English translation, fully restored for a new generation of readers.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.


About the Author

Johann Wyss (1743-1818) was, like the narrator of The Swiss Family Robinson, a Swiss pastor who had four sons. He devised the idea of the island and its plethora of natural resources as a way to entertain and instruct his children. One of his sons, Johann Rudolf (1782-1830), was an accomplished writer and poet, educator and editor who devoted himself to collecting and publishing the folklore of his homeland, and who in 1811 composed the Swiss national anthem, "Call'st Thou, My Fatherland?," to the tune of "God Save the King." Johann Rudolf is best known for having completed and seen to publication of his father's novel, originally titled Der Schweizerische Robinson (Zurich, 1812) and translated into English two years after its first publication. The novel was an immediate popular success, and since then its translators have been many, and they have freely adapted and expanded the original German text, making it one of the most popular novels of all time. This edition reproduces the original English translation from 1816 by the great political philosopher William Godwin and his wife Mary.

John Seelye (editor, 1931-2015) taught at the University of Florida and wrote numerous books, among them The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain at the Movies, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Literature, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Early Republic, Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, and War Games: Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism. For thirty years he was the consulting editor for Penguin Classics in American literature.