Storyteller : The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Damrosch, Leopold.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894.

Stevenson, Robert Louis.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (581 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2025.

Summary:

From a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson's life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fiction "This magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. . . . Dazzling."-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is famed for Treasure Island , Kidnapped , and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with "smoldering rich fire." Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. "I loved a ship," he wrote, "as a man loves burgundy or daybreak." The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific. Samoan friends named Stevenson "Storyteller." Reading, he said, "should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves." His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories "one of the forms of happiness," and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist. In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer's letters in his many voices and moods--playful, imaginative, at times tragic.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Man and the Artist

1 The Early Years

2 Schooling and Travels

3 Happiness in the Countryside

4 The Master Builders

5 A New Life at the University

6 "I Want Pleasure,"

7 A "Horrible Atheist,"

8 A Mentor and a Madonna

9 "Ordered South,"

10 First Steps as a Writer

11 Artists and Boats

12 Enter Fanny

13 The Donkey Book

14 From Glasgow to San Francisco

15 A Year in California

16 Edinburgh and Davos

17 A Breakthrough in the Highlands

18 Alpine Cold, and Treasure Island

19 Two Years on the Riviera

20 A Home in England

21 A Torrent of Writing

22 Creating a Myth: Jekyll and Hyde

23 Kidnapped

24 Farewell to Europe

25 An Adirondack Winter

26 Sailing the High Seas

27 Hawaii

28 The Cruise of the Equator

29 Interlude

30 Life at Vailima

31 Missionaries, Chiefs, and Bureaucrats

32 The End of Paradise

33 The Last Novels

34 "I Was Not Born for Age,"

Epilogue

Chronology

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-300-28577-9

OCLC:

1532790076