Storyteller

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 transl