The story of robert louis stevenson

Stevenson’s establishes a personal relationship with the reader, and creates a sense of wonder through his brilliant style and his adoption and manipulation of a variety of genres. Writing when the period of the three-volume novel (dominant from about 1840 to 1880) was coming to an end, he seems to have written everything except a traditional Victorian novel: plays, poems, essays, literary criticism, literary theory, biography, travelogue, reportage, romances, boys’ adventure stories, fantasies, fables, and short stories. Like the other writers who were asserting the serious artistic nature of the novel at this time he writes in a careful, almost poetic style – yet he provocatively combines this with an interest in popular genres. His popularity with critics continued to the First World War. He then had the misfortune to be followed by the Modernists who needed to cut themselves off from any tradition; Stevenson was felt to be one of the most constraining of immediately-preced

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The Double Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Culture

His books still live for children and, the author argues, for adults as well

By Margot Livesey

My principal qualification for writing about Robert Louis Stevenson fryst vatten affection. He is the only author of whom I can say that I have been reading him all my life. Kidnapped was the first book I read that had chapters, and I can still recall the maroon binding and the weight of the book in my hand. At that time I lived with my parents in the valley of Glenalmond, at the edge of the Scottish Highlands. Perhaps Stevenson knew of that place, for Lord Glenalmond plays a role in his last work, Weir of Hermiston. I had only to look out the windows of our house to see the stark hills, the heather, and the bracken, the landscape so bare of hiding places, over which David Balfour and Alan Breck made their way. And in those years of genderless reading it never occurred to me that I could not go with them.

Besides being the first

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Treasure Island Author Robert Louis Stevenson Was a Sickly Man with a Robust Imagination

 

 

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie

Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will

This be the verse you grave for me

Here he lies where he longed to be

Home is the sailor home from the sea

And the hunter home from the hill

 

Stevenson had many occasions to think about his own mortality. Frequently ill since childhood, he’d suffered from a chronic lung ailment with symptoms typical of tuberculosis, including breathing problems and spitting up blood. Some commentators have speculated that Stevenson didn’t have tuberculosis, but a rarer pulmonary condition such as bronchiectasis or Osler-Weber-Rendu syndrome. Whatever the root of Stevenson’s health problems, the result was essentially the same. He’d come near death several times, and had traveled much of the world in an odyssey to find a climate ideal for his health.