Realistic survival and adventure
fiction stories can be found in almost every culture around the world. Survival stories can be traced back to the oral native american story, the Bible's old testament, and to
the Chinese folktale. The first great novel, Homer's Odyssey, is a story of survival.
The genre of adventure tales has sparked the interest of
people from the beginning of time.
Survival novels
written for the young adult began after the publication of Daniel
Defoe's great survival novel,
The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Even though
Defoe's book was written for an adult audience, many younger readers were
enthralled with the survival story of a shipwreck involving adventure on a far away island. It spurred many offshoot novels of Robinson
Crusoe such as Swiss Family Robinson
(1812) by Johan Wyss. Soon after, survival and adventure stories became a popular genre written specifically for young adult readers.
Although many of the first young adult survival stories mirrored Defoe's shipwrecked on an island theme, other types of adventure also peaked the interest of readers. These include stories from the frontier, American Indians, war, travel, and wilderness.
The following list gives a brief timeline of some of the popular survival stories written since Swiss Family Robinson was translated to English in 1814.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Frederick Marryat, Mastermine Ready; or, The Wreck of the Pacific (1841)
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1854)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1881)
Jack London, Call of the Wild (1903)
Charles Boardman Hawes, The Dark Frigate (1923)
Gertrude Warner, The Boxcar Children (1942)
Jean Craighead George, My side of the Mountain (1952)
Farley Moway, Lost in the Barrens (1956)
Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins, (1960)
Sheila Every Burnford, The Incredible Journey (1961)
Theodore Taylor, The Cay (1969)
Cynthia Voight, Homecoming (1981)
Gary Paulson, Hatchet (1987)
Will Hobbs, Downriver (1995)
Diane Tullson, Edge (2002)
