On the evening of November 26, 1703, a cyclone from the North Atlantic struck southern Britain with speeds of over seventy miles per hour, resulting in the death of more than 8,000 people. Witnesses reported seeing cows left hanging in the branches of trees and windmills burning from the friction of their rotating blades. For Defoe, who had gone bankrupt and had just been released from prison for provocative writings, the storm marked one of his darkest moments. However, it also provided him with the material for his first book, and in the powerful depiction of private suffering and individual survival unfolding against a backdrop of public disaster, we can trace the lines of his masterpieces such as "A Journal of the Plague Year" and "Robinson Crusoe".