The Swiss Family Robinson

Johann David Wyss

Random House Children's Books, Apr 13, 1999 - Juvenile Fiction - 336 pages

"For many days we had been tempest-tossed . . .the raging storm increased in fury on the seventh day all hope was lost."  From these dire opening lines, a delightful story of adventure begins.  One family will emerge alive from this terrible storm: the Robinson's -- a Swiss pastor, his wife, and four sons, plus two dogs and a shipload of livestock, hens, pigeons and geese!  Inspired by Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Cruesoe," this heartwarming tale portrays a family's struggle to create a new life for themselves on a strange and fantastic tropical island.  There each boy must learn to control his own nature -- such as Ernest's bookishness and Fritz's hot temper -- as their adventures lead to amazing discoveries, danger, and tantalizing surprises, including a puzzling message tied to an albatross's leg.  But it is the authenticity of the boys' behavior, the ingenuity of the family, and the natural wonders of this exotic land that have made The Swiss Family Robinson, first published in 1812-1813, one of the world's best-loved and most enduring stories of shipwreck and survival.


From the Paperback edition.

What people are saying

Review: The Swiss Family Robinson

User Review  - Victor Atkinson - Goodreads

This is undoubtedly the worst book I have ever read. The entire plotline is absolutely boring and unimaginative. It is as if Wyss combined Robinson Crusoe, a horribly overly optimistic Mormon family ...

Review: The Swiss Family Robinson

User Review  - Jama - Goodreads

This is a book for kids, and my boys really like it a lot. Many of the negative reviews posted about this book are totally correct. The Swiss Family is a product of its time. They treat the island ...

Contents

• I: 1
• II: 9
• III: 19

About the author

\Johann David Wyss (1743-1818) was a clergyman in Berne, Switzerland. A former military chaplain, Wyss spoke four languages, loved nature, and was deeply involved in the raising of his four boys, reading to them and taking them on hikes and hunting trips. To teach them moral lessons and entertain them, he read them a story he had written about a family just like theirs (each boy in the story is based on one of Wyss’s four sons), who had been shipwrecked on a tropical island. This handwritten manuscript was more than eight hundred pages long and one of his sons, Johann Emmanuel, helped him illustrate it. Years later another son, Johann Rudolf, by then a professor at the Berne Academy, found his fathers manuscript, edited it, and published it in 1812-1813 as The Swiss Family Robinson. The first English translation appeared in 1814, and there have since been nearly two hundred versions of this novel, as well as two films and a television movie.


From the Paperback edition.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Swiss Family Robinson
• Author: Johann David Wyss
• Edition: reissue
• Publisher: Random House Children's Books, 1999
• ISBN: 0440415942, 9780440415947
• Length: 336 pages
• Subjects: Adventure and adventurers; Castaways; Family; Family life/ Fiction; Fiction / Classics; Islands; Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / General; Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories; Juvenile Fiction / Classics; Juvenile Fiction / Family / General; Juvenile Fiction / Nature & the Natural World / General; Survival; Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc; Survival/ Fiction; Transportation / Ships & Shipbuilding / General