I’ve read Robinson Crusoe, My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet, Julie of the Wolves, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and The Martian. Any books you can recommend in which the main character spends much of the book alone?
And by “alone”, I mean without other humans. For purposes of this thread, animals don’t count, unless they’re sentient.
Life of Pi springs to mind.
Though I can’t recall the name, there is a good book about a guy who spent the longest time on a emergency raft alone at sea, based on the real person who did this. Should be easy to find… yes found it: Adrift. It was a enjoyable read in that theme.
Pincher Martin by William Golding.
Concrete Island by J. G. Ballard
The technical term for this “Robinsonade.” Wikipedia has a list, though many involve groups of people being stranded.
Stephen King’s novel Misery and short story Survivor Type.
The Black Stallion.
The Old Man and the Sea.
The River Why by James Duncan, maybe.
The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King.
Hobbyist
A short story by Eric Frank Russell
Fight Club.
All of the books in the Steven Gould’s Jumper series: Jumper, Reflex, Impulse and Exo.
And Gerald’s Game.
I’m sensing a theme.
Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World.
The film Robinson Crusoe on Mars and the novel No Man Friday (AKA First on Mars) by Rex Gordon, which some think may have inspired the film.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, and the three films it inspired.
The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison and the film based on it. At least for the first third or so.
The first part of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides.
Sterling Lanier’s short story And the Voice of the Turtle.
I notice that the stories fall into two types – Robinsonades and post-apocalyptic stories. But most of the Robinsonades I have read actually have a bunch of people surviving cut off from the rest of the world (Swiss Family Robinson, Mysterious Island, etc.), so more of them are post-apocalyptic. And even in those cases the protagonist is only alone at the beginning, until he hooks up with the few other survivors.
Aloft, a novella in the book Strange Weather, by Joe Hill.
For short stories, there’s Alfred Bester’s classic “Adam and No Eve.” (Stay to the end.)
A novel partly inspired by the author’s real experiences: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. In real life, Koestler was a prisoner of Franco’s Spain. The novel is about a prisoner of Stalin’s Soviet Union, but without ever mentioning Stalin or the Soviet Union.
I guess you’re looking for novels, but here are a few non-fiction titles that qualify:
Seven Years’ Solitary by Edith Bone
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
One Man’s Wilderness by Richard Proenneke and Sam Keith
The OP mentioned most of the books that sprang first to my mind. Maybe, in true SDMB style, I’ll wait until this thread gets to page 2 and then say “I can’t believe nobody has mentioned” one of them.
The one I thought of that wasn’t mentioned was Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour.
Johnny Got His Gun.
My first thought after Hatchet and Island of the Blue Dolphins was Brian’s Winter, the second sequel to Hatchet, written after readers complained that Brian got out of the wilderness too easily.
Two C S Forester books might fit the bill, Brown on Resolution and Death to the French.