Storyteller
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Publishing:2nd Sep '25
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 2nd September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.
“Damrosch is one of the preeminent literary biographers of our time, and this magnificent biography of Robert Louis Stevenson reveals much about a writer that we think we knew. . . . Dazzling.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In this biography told as an adventure story, Leo Damrosch convincingly portrays R. L. Stevenson as one of the most endearing writers in the English language.”—Alberto Manguel, author of A Reader on Reading
“This will now stand as the standard modern life of Robert Louis Stevenson, its scholarly authority enhanced by its readability. The events of Stevenson’s extraordinary life are narrated with verve, and RLS himself is brought vividly before us, his complexity and charisma conveyed without any note of hagiography (or, conversely, critical debunking).”—Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley
“This is a Stevenson biography aimed at readers of Stevenson. RLS sought adventure in his lifetime; his contemporaries were admiring and envious of his bold, restless spirit, and the twenty-first-century reader is no less likely to relish this quest to encounter the elemental forces of a powerful storm, a forty-below cold spell, or a desperate dash across the American continent to find the romantic partner of one’s dreams.”—William Sharpe, author of The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images
“In this superb and richly atmospheric biography, Damrosch brings all his fine scholarly attention to the strange world of Stevenson’s fictions and poetry, but also revels in his gloriously outspoken letters and his fraught but intensely vivid friendships. This is a large, beautiful, and mature biographic portrait.”—Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder
“Is there a better biographer alive today than Leo Damrosch? His latest, a full-scale biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, is a brilliant storytelling achievement worthy of both its title and the redoubtable subject at its center. Stevenson lived more in his forty-four years than most do in a lifetime.”—Morten Høi Jensen, author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain”
ISBN: 9780300268621
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
584 pages