Book History A to Z: N is for Novel

Novels are a form of written narrative that is centered on telling the story of an individual.  Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605-15) is sometimes considered a precursor to the novel, and Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740-41) are considered the first “real” novels.  These works were not based on legends, or retold tales from the past, they were original stories about individual people. Although there were other types of narrative stories, such as French romans, novels were rooted in realism, in what real people might experience, not in larger than life characters or epic heroes, as in the romans.  The novel eventually became the first literary form to tell the stories of average people, and to be widely read by all social classes.

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