Storyteller : the life of Robert Louis Stevenson / Leo Damrosch.
| Author/creator | Damrosch, Leopold author. |
| Other author | Yale University Press, publishing company. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication | New Haven : Yale University Press, [2025] |
| Copyright Date | ©2025 |
| Description | vii, 554 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps (some colour), portraits (some colour) ; 25 cm |
| Subjects |
| Variant title | Story teller : the life of Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Contents | Introduction: the man and the artist -- The early years -- Schooling and travels -- Happiness in the countryside -- The master builders -- A new life at the university -- "I want pleasure" -- A "horrible atheist" -- A mentor and a Madonna -- "Ordered south" -- First steps as a writer -- Artists and boats -- Enter Fanny -- The donkey book -- From Glasgow to San Francisco -- A year in California -- Edinburgh and Davos -- A breakthrough in the highlands -- Alpine cold, and Treasure Island -- Two years on the Riviera -- A home in England -- A torrent of writing -- Creating myth: Jekyll and Hyde -- Kidnapped -- Farewell to Europe -- An Adirondack winter -- Sailing the high seas -- Hawaii -- The cruise of the Equator -- Interlude -- Life at Vailima -- Missionaries, chiefs, and bureaucrats -- The end of paradise -- The last novels -- "I was not born for age." |
| Abstract | From a critically acclaimed biographer, an engrossing narrative of Robert Louis Stevenson's life, a story as romantic and adventurous as his fiction. 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. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 483-525) and index. |
| Genre/form | Biographies. |
| Genre/form | Illustrated works. |
| Genre/form | Biographies. |
| Genre/form | Ouvrages illustrés. |
| ISBN | 9780300268621 hardcover |
| ISBN | 0300268629 hardcover |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joyner | General Stacks | PR5493 .D36 2025 | ✔ Available | Place Hold |