If ever a book could be consideres imperishable, it is Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's masterpiece has maintained, generation after generation, its special place among the world's classics. As an adventure story, as a parable of man's indomitable spirit and resource, fulness, it is as alive and exciting as it was she first published in 1719. It comes into the Modern Library with A Journal of the Plague Year, that feat of the imagination which reads as if it were a documented history. Both are brilliantly introduced by America's foremost authority on eighteenth-century England, Louis Kronenberger.