Storyteller The life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Biographer and Harvard literature professor Damrosch follows up Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World with a comprehensive portrait of Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850--1894). Drawing on more than 3,000 of Stevenson's letters and his unpublished memoir, Damrosch explains that Stevenson's path to literary success was far from linear; his early education was "casual and intermittent," and his dislike of school persisted even as he pursued a law degree. His first book, 1878's An Inland Voyage, was a travelogue recounting a canoe trip he took through Belgium and France. He began reaching a wide readership in the early 1880s, with the publication of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the poetry collection A Child's Garden of Verses. Damrosch draws parallels between Stevenson's works, noting that the theme of dividedness or duality of human nature in Jekyll and Hyde recurred in Kidnapped, and explores real-life influences on his characters, like how Treasure Island's Long John Silver was based on his friend, the poet William Ernest Henley. Through granular detail (" eyes were unusually far apart and struck everyone as compelling") and astute analyses, like of the crucial role his wife Fanny played in his life and work, Damrosch brings the celebrated novelist to life. It's a notable achievement. (Sept.)

"Not born for this age." 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. Details of childhood reading, adult adventures, and professional ambition abound. Damrosch shows how important Stevenson's marriage was to the creation of his fictions. Fanny Stevenson and her sister, Nellie, come alive here in rich quotations from biographies and letters. Nellie's assessment of her sister and brother-in-law's marriage is a fulcrum on which the book balances: "Her profound faith in his genius before the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself." Theirs was a marriage of "anarchic excitement," and Damrosch limns their life together with all the vividness of a 19th-century melodramatist. Family is one thing. Land is another: Scotland, California, Samoa. Damrosch makes the point that it was the physical environment that stimulated Stevenson--that his writing comes not simply from his own imagination, but from the interaction of that imagination with landscape. Stevenson's best fictions, therefore, have all the realism and coherence of a great map.Treasure Island succeeds not so much on the depth of its characters but on the vigor of its realism. Damrosch quotes Stevenson: "The great creative writer shows us the realization and the apotheosis of the daydreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the daydream." Stevenson's life and work meet at the intersection of reality and daydream, longing and satisfaction. Damrosch makes the real seem dreamed and the dreamed real. A dazzling life of Robert Louis Stevenson, centering on family and landscape as the axes of his imagination. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.