This chapter honours the considerable challenge of attempting to sum up the critical reception of an author whose oeuvre is both compendious and disputed. It contemplates the gradual shift of focus in the twentieth century from biographical to literary criticism in the many attempts to wrestle Defoe into something comprehensible. As a reliable touchstone amid the many twentieth-century attribution wars, Robinson Crusoe has and continues to dominate critical inquiry into Defoe due to (rise of the) novel theories. And yet, ultimately, scholarship has also managed to move beyond, without giving up, Crusoe.