Almost one hundred years ago, there died at his home at Samoa, in the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson, a dedicated writer of remarkable versatility. Novelist, essayist, travel-writer, poet, writer of ballads and fables, a brilliant letter-writer and, above all, a short story writer of genius, Stevenson suffered all his life from ill health. Born in Edinburgh, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland especially the Highlands was to inspire his finest work. Descended from a distinguished family of lighthouse ...
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Almost one hundred years ago, there died at his home at Samoa, in the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson, a dedicated writer of remarkable versatility. Novelist, essayist, travel-writer, poet, writer of ballads and fables, a brilliant letter-writer and, above all, a short story writer of genius, Stevenson suffered all his life from ill health. Born in Edinburgh, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland especially the Highlands was to inspire his finest work. Descended from a distinguished family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson never wavered from his ardent resolution to become a writer. He is famous not only as the author of Treasure Island, beloved by schoolboys and adults alike, Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but also as the author of Thrawn Janet set in his native Scotland and many other stories of adventure, both macabre and humorous. Bryan Bevan, in his new biography, reveals the real man and the writer, intensely hard working, finding inspiration in his last phase in the South Seas, to be seen notably in his fine works Beach of Falesa and The Ebb-Tide but forever nostalgic for his beloved Scotland as Stevenson reveals in his last, great, unfinished masterpiece Weir of Hermiston.
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