Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson [Hardcover]

From a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevensons life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fiction

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Damrosch brings to Stevensons life the calm, humane interpretive powers that he deployed with such success in . . .The Club. . . . [An] excellent book.Meghan Cox Gurdon,Wall Street Journal

Robert Louis Stevenson (18501894) is famed forTreasure Island,Kidnapped, andStrange 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 l!